Week 4

THE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK
OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND

GOVERNANCE
Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Downloaded from Elgar Online at 07/01/2017 05:41:25PM
via University of Liverpool
The International Handbook
of Public Administration and
Governance
Edited by
Andrew Massey
Professor, University of Exeter, UK
Karen Johnston
Professor, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957084
This book is available electronically in the

Social and Political Science subject collection
DOI 10.4337/9781781954492
ISBN 978 1 78195 448 5 (cased)

ISBN 978 1 78195 449 2 (eBook)
Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow

01
Contents
List of contributorsvii
Introduction1
Andrew Massey
PART I PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, NEW PUBLIC

MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE: CONCEPTS
AND CONTESTABILITIES
1 Public administration, public management and governance 13

Robert Pyper
2 Governance: a typology and some challenges 35
Geert Bouckaert
3 Governance: if governance is everything, maybe it’s nothing 56
Perri 6
4 Executive governance and its puzzles 81
R.A.W. Rhodes and Anne Tiernan
5 Paradigms of non-Western public administration and
governance104
Wolfgang Drechsler
PART II INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES OF PUBLIC

ADMINISTRATION, NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
AND GOVERNANCE
6 Public service reform in South Africa: from apartheid to new

public management 135
Robert Cameron
7 The political economy of administrative reforms in Egypt:
governance, reforms and challenges 158
Ahmed Badran
8 The Canadian public service: in search of a new equilibrium 182
Donald J. Savoie

vi The international handbook of public administration and governance
9 Public administration and governance in the USA 199

Greg Andranovich and J. Theodore Anagnoson
10 Public administration in Brazil: structure, reforms, and
participation226
Ricardo Corrêa Gomes and Leonardo Secchi
11 Public administration in Latin America: adaptation to a new
democratic reality 247
Guillermo M. Cejudo
12 Administrative developments in India 271
Krishna K. Tummala
13 The Tao of governance: public administration reform in China 295
Zhichang Zhu
14 Capacity, complexity and public sector reform in Australia 323
John Halligan
15 Australia: building policy capacity for managing wicked policy
problems341
Brian W. Head and Janine O’Flynn
16 The state and perceptions of public sector reform in Europe 369
Dion Curry, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Sebastian Jilke and
Steven Van de Walle
17 Government challenges in Slovenia at a time of global
economic crisis and austerity measures 399
Stanka Setnikar Cankar and Veronika Petkovšek
18 United Kingdom: government, governance and public
administration complexity 416
Duncan McTavish
Conclusion442
Karen Johnston
Index463

Contributors
Perri 6 is Professor in Public Management at Queen Mary University of

London, UK. He has published extensively on executive government, neo-
Durkheimian institutional theory, organizational processes, public policy,
inter-organizational relationships, networks and joined-up government in
public services. His recent books include Explaining Political Judgement
(Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Principles of Methodology (with
C.A. Bellamy, Sage, 2012).
J. Theodore Anagnoson is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at
California State University, USA, where he researches and teaches courses
on public policy and administration and American politics. He is also a
visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he
teaches courses on American politics and public policy. His research inter-
ests are the politics of federal policy making and implementation. He is the
author, most recently, of ‘The United States civil service’, a book chapter
in The International Handbook on Civil Service Systems (Cheltenham, UK
and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing), and co-author
of Governing California in the 21st Century (4th edn, New York: Norton,
2013).
Greg Andranovich is Professor of Political Science at California State
University, Los Angeles, where he teaches public administration and
urban politics courses. His research interests are the urban impacts of
the Olympic Games, and the challenges of collaborative public decision
making. He has authored and co-authored numerous books and journal
articles in the area of public administration and urban governance.
Ahmed Badran is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Mohammed Bin
Rashid School of Government, Dubai. He holds a PhD degree in Politics
(Public Policy) from the University of Exeter, UK. His research expertise
is on public policy, public administration and regulatory processes. Dr
Badran’s research interests cover regulatory governance and politics of
regulation in liberalized public utilities, including telecoms, water and
energy sectors, particularly in transition and developing economies.
Geert Bouckaert is Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at
the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Public Governance Institute, Leuven,
Belgium. He is coordinator of the Policy Research Centre – Governmental
vii

viii The international handbook of public administration and governance
Organization – Decisive Governance and president of the International

Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). He is an internationally
respected academic with research expertise in public administration,
performance management, financial management and trust, with e xtensive
publications in these research areas.
Robert Cameron is Professor of Public Administration at the University
of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests include public
administration, local government politics and reorganization and public
sector reform. His published research, in numerous journals and books,
is highly regarded. Professor Cameron is a member of the Board of the
Comparative Local Government and Politics panel at the International
Political Science Association.
Stanka Setnikar Cankar is Professor at the University of Ljubljana,
Slovenia. Her areas of research expertise are public administration,
economics and finance. Since 2000, Professor Cankar has been a member
of the Senate of the University of Ljubljana. She has published a number of
highly regarded journal articles and books in public administration, public
economics and finance, and is a member of various editorial boards, chief
editor of Administration magazine and a member of the Board NISPAcee.
Guillermo M. Cejudo is provost at the Center for Research and Teaching
on Economics, CIDE, in Mexico City, where he has been professor at the
Public Administration Department since 2006. He is the author of several
government reports, and also of various books on Mexican state gov-
ernments, accountability, public management, transparency, evaluation
and public policy analysis. He has published in the International Review
of Administrative Sciences, International Public Management Journal,
International Public Management Review, and Public Administration
Review. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Boston University. His
research interests are quality of government in new democracies, account-
ability, local governance and policy analysis.
Dion Curry is a lecturer in public policy in the Department of Political
and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, Wales, UK. Dr Curry’s
research focuses on devolution and regionalization, EU public policy and
governance and multi-level governance in EU and comparative contexts.
Wolfgang Drechsler is Professor and Chair of Governance at Tallinn
University of Technology, Estonia (TUT), and Vice Dean for International
Relations of the Faculty of Social Sciences. As a respected academic he has
served as Advisor to the President of Estonia, as Executive Secretary with
the German Wissenschaftsrat during German Reunification, and, as an
APSA Congressional Fellow, as Senior Legislative Analyst in the United

Contributors ix
States Congress, and has been a consultant to several international organi-

zations and countries. Professor Drechsler’s areas of interest are non-
Western, especially Chinese and Islamic, public administration; public
administration, technology and innovation; and public management
reform.
Ricardo Corrêa Gomes is Associate Professor in Public Management at
Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil, and is the Coordinator of the Public
Administration and Government division of the Associação Nacional de
Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Administração – ANPAD. Dr Gomes has
published extensively in the area of public management and is a member
of the editorial board of scientific journals such as Public Management
Review, International Journal of Public Sector Management, Financial
Accountability & Management, and The International Journal of Public and
Private Healthcare Management and Economics.
John Halligan is Professor of Public Administration, Institute for
Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Australia.
His research interests are comparative public management and govern-
ance, specifically public sector reform, performance management and
government institutions. He specializes in the anglophone countries of
Australia and New Zealand, and, for comparative purposes, Canada
and the UK. His current studies are corporate governance in the public
sector, performance management, and a comparative analysis of public
management. Professor Halligan, as a distinguished academic and
adviser to government, has published numerous books and articles in
these research areas.
Gerhard Hammerschmid is Associate Dean and Professor of Public and
Financial Management at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin,
Germany. He is Program Director for the Hertie School’s Executive
Master of Public Management (EMPM). His research focuses on public
management (reform), performance management, comparative public
administration, personnel management/HRM, public service motiva-
tion and organization theory. Professor Hammerschmid has published
several books on public management reform and in various international,
peer-reviewed journals.
Brian W. Head is Professor at the Institute for Social Science Research,
University of Queensland, Australia. He has held senior roles in gov-
ernment, universities and the non-government sector. He is the author
and editor of several books and numerous articles on public manage-
ment, governance, social issues and environmental policy. His major
interests are evidence-based policy, program evaluation, early interven-

x The international handbook of public administration and governance
tion and prevention, collaboration and consultation, service delivery,

accountability and leadership.
Sebastian Jilke is a PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Department of Public Administration, and is a research associate and
administrative manager within a major European research project,
‘Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future’. His
research interest lies at the intersection of public administration and politi-
cal science, and the introduction of choice and competition into public
services.
Karen Johnston (née Miller) is Professor of Politics and Public Policy and
Associate Dean (Research) at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. She
has extensive academic and research experience, having worked in leading
universities in South Africa, the USA and the UK. In addition to her
academic career she has worked with and for public sector and civil society
organizations to improve public service delivery, and has worked for a
donor organization to promote democratic development on an interna-
tional scale. Professor Johnston’s research expertise includes public policy,
political–administrative leadership, public governance, public manage-
ment and gender equality, and she has published numerous peer-reviewed
journal articles and books in these areas.
Andrew Massey is Professor of Politics and Head of Department at the
University of Exeter, UK. His research areas of expertise include UK,
European, and US policy and politics. His main areas of research include
comparative public policy, public administration and issues around the
reform and modernization of government and governance at all levels in
the UK, the USA, the EU and globally. He has published extensively in
these areas, and as a respected academic has been an adviser to govern-
ment, serves on executive boards of a number of scholarly organizations
such as the European Group of Public Administration, and on editorial
boards. Professor Massey is currently the editor of Public Money and
Management and the International Review for Administrative Sciences.
Duncan McTavish is Professor of Public Policy and Management at
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. He has a wide range of experience
and expertise as an academic, practitioner and consultant in public and
private sectors. His track record is national and international in scope,
and in academia he has worked in a number of universities and in a range
of countries. He has a wide range of highly regarded publications, edits a
leading academic journal, has taught undergraduate, postgraduate and
professional-level programmes and has led and managed major research
and consultancy projects.

Contributors xi
Janine O’Flynn is Professor of Public Management at the University of

Melbourne. Her expertise is in public sector management, particularly
in the areas of public sector reform and relationships. Professor O’Flynn
is an editor at the Australian Journal of Public Administration, and is an
editorial board member for Public Administration, Journal of Management
& Organization and Canadian Public Administration. She was awarded
the 2013 Best Book Award in the Public Non- profit stream by the
United States Academy of Management for Rethinking Public Service
Delivery: Managing with External Providers (Routledge; with John
Alford), and was part of the research team that received both the Charles
H. Levine and the Carlo Masini Award (2013) and was n ominated for the
Carolyn Dexter Award (2014).
Veronika Petkovšek is an assistant in Public Sector Economics at the
Faculty of Administration, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her
research interests include public sector reform, health care in Slovenia,
evaluation of effectiveness and efficiency in public administration, public
procurement and cross-border cooperation in the Alps–Adriatic region.
Robert Pyper is Professor of Government and Public Policy at the
University of the West of Scotland, UK. His research interests include
national and international trends in civil service policy and management;
aspects of accountability in public policy and management; modernization
and reform agendas in the British civil service; public services reform and
modernization; and public policy in the devolved polities. His books, book
chapters and journal articles cover topics including UK governance, the
British civil service, devolution, and public services modernization.
R.A.W. Rhodes is Professor of Government (Research) at the University
of Southampton, UK, and at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia; and
Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Newcastle, UK. He is
life Vice President and former Chair and President of the Political Studies
Association of the UK; a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences
in Australia; and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. He
has also been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, editor of Public
Administration from 1986 to 2011, and Treasurer of the Australian Political
Studies Association, 1994–2011. He is an i nternationally respected scholar
in public administration with an extensive publication record (see http://
www.raw-rhodes.co.uk/).
Donald J. Savoie holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration
and Governance at the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.
He is a former civil servant and has extensive work experience in both
government and academia. He has been an adviser to federal, provincial

xii The international handbook of public administration and governance
and territorial governments, the private sector, the World Bank and the
United Nations. He is a highly respected academic and has authored and
co-authored numerous books and journal articles.
Leonardo Secchi is Professor at the Universidade do Estado de Santa
Catarina, Brazil. He has extensive research experience and publica-
tions in the area of public administration, bureaucracy, administrative
reform, public policy and studies of local government. He was President
of PVBLICA – Institute for Public Policy – is Director of Events of the
Brazilian Society of Public Administration (SBAP) and Professor of
Undergraduate and Master’s Degrees from the State University of Santa
Catarina (UDESC/ESAG), where he teaches Public Policy.
Anne Tiernan is a Professor at the School of Government and International
Relations, Griffith University, Australia, where she is Director of post-
graduate and executive programs in policy analysis and public adminis-
tration. Dr Tiernan’s research interests include: policy advice, executive
governance, policy capacity, federalism and intergovernmental coordi-
nation. She has authored numerous books and articles, including, most
recently, Lessons in Governing: A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of
Staff and The Gatekeepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff
(both with R.A.W. Rhodes, Melbourne University Publishing, 2014).
Dr Tiernan is a member of the Public Records Review Committee of the
Queensland State Archives and has served on the Board of Queensland’s
Public Service Commission. She consults regularly to Australian govern-
ments at all levels.
Krishna K. Tummala is Professor Emeritus, and was Director of the
Graduate Program in Public Administration, Kansas State University,
Manhattan, KS, USA. He served on the governing bodies of the American
Society for Public Administration and the National Association of School of
Public Affairs and Administration, and was President of the public admin-
istration honour society, Pi Alpha Alpha. Among the several awards he
received are: Paul H. Appleby Award for ‘Distinguished Service to Indian
Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) and Public Administration,
2011’; Fred Riggs award for ‘Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in the
Field of Comparative and International Administration’, SICA/ASPA,
2008; and ‘Don Stone’ award from the American Society for Public
Administration for ‘Outstanding Services’, 2005. He has published exten-
sively in various national and international journals in his areas of
competence.
Steven Van de Walle is Professor of Public Administration at Erasmus
University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is Fellow of the Public

Contributors xiii
Management Institute at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a senior

member of the Netherlands Institute of Government. His research and
teaching covers the role of public administration in societies and in the
state, and specific research interests include citizens’ perceptions of the
public sector, government–citizen relations, public sector performance,
corruption, trust in government, satisfaction surveys, comparative public
administration and governance indicators. Professor van de Walle’s
research has been published in books and in leading public administration
journals.
Zhichang Zhu is a Reader in Strategy and Management at the University
of Hull Business School, UK and holds visiting professorships in China,
Japan and the USA. Dr Zhu researches and teaches in corporate and
reform strategy from an institutional, comparative and complexity
perspective. His work has been listed as Strategy1Business Best Business
Books of the Year (2012).

Introduction
Andrew Massey
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

(All things are in the process of change; we also are in the process of change
among them.)
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
Edmund Burke (1991)
Nascentes morimur.
(From the moment of being born, we die.) Manilus, Astronomica iv.16
We all live continually in a time of change, whether in an age of innova-

tion or in a period of decay. This is the natural ebb and flow of the human
condition, and likewise that of all the institutions created and staffed by
people. Even those venerable customs and structures such as the civil
and administrative organizations in old countries are constantly being
reinvented and reformed (Kuhlman and Wollman, 2014). Change also
affects newly formed countries, even as they emerge star-like from the
flux of war or civil strife; or simply because their citizens no longer wish
to be linked to an autocratic regime, another nation or group of nations.
Some of these resurrect ancient borders and long- smothered nations;
others challenge the colonial borders bequeathed by retreating empires
(Vidmar, 2012). In all these examples the core structures of the state and
the way in which these link to the populace are integral to understanding
the delivery of basic services such as law and security, and more sophisti-
cated services such as higher education and innovative medicine. There is
a mix of levels, from global governance and supranational, legal organiza-
tions (such as the International Court of Justice and International Court
of Arbitration) through to myriad local government structures around
the globe. Understanding this multi-level governance and the differenti-
ated forms it and the constituent polities take, through surveying public
administration, is a core aim of this book.
The transformation of public administration around the globe in the
last 30 years shows no sign of abating and remains driven by the power-
ful dynamics of technical innovation, political development, globaliza-
tion and economic necessity. Our understanding of how we make sense
of these changes also fluctuates, as does our use of language to describe
these phenomena. For example, this volume explores the concepts and

2 The international handbook of public administration and governance
racticalities of both public administration and governance. But these

p
remain contested in many respects. This was epitomized in a 2013 debate
over the nature of ‘governance’, as considered by a group of leading schol-
ars via the blog of the eponymous journal (http://governancejournal.net).
Francis Fukuyama set that debate in motion with a paper that called for
better measures to assess governance, while noting that these did not nec-
essarily need to include democratic aspects of accountability and liberal-
democratic notions of what is meant by good governance (Fukuyama,
2013). In other words, as he, scholars and political leaders from various
parts of the world and different ideological traditions have argued (in dif-
ferent ways), good governance does not need to be democratic governance.
Indeed, it may be the case that authoritarian governments can deliver good
governance in the sense that it is efficient, effective and delivers good-quality
public services. This perspective is anathema to those who argue that good
governance is synonymous with liberal-democratic notions of accountabil-
ity and transparency (Fraser-Moleketi, 2005; Halabi, 2004). Yet there are
many in the global South (and elsewhere) who, while they call for public
administration to deliver good governance on precisely those utilitarian
grounds of efficient and effective services that have the alleviation of human
misery as their desired outcome, eschew a call for Western-style democracy.
For example, since it was established in 1944, as one of the so-called
Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank’s stated mission has been
to help to establish ‘a world free of poverty’. Indeed, this aim is carved in
stone in the organization’s Washington headquarters and features on the
Bank’s website, and many of its publications over the years state boldly
(and in several different ways) that
This mission underpins all our analytical, financial and convening work in more
than 145 client countries that strive to end extreme poverty and promote shared
prosperity. The developing world has already attained the first Millennium
Development Goal target – to cut the 1990 poverty rate in half by 2015. The
1990 extreme poverty rate – $1.25 a day in 2005 prices – was halved in 2010,
according to estimates. According to these estimates, 21 percent of people in the
developing world lived at or below $1.25 a day. That’s down from 43 percent
in 1990 and 52 percent in 1981.This means that 1.22 billion people lived on less
than $1.25 a day in 2010, compared with 1.91 billion in 1990, and 1.94 billion
in 1981. Notwithstanding this achievement, even if the current rate of progress
is to be maintained, some 1 billion people will still live in extreme poverty in
2015 – and progress has been slower at higher poverty lines. In all, 2.4 billion
people lived on less than US $2 a day in 2010, the average poverty line in devel-
oping countries and another common measurement of deep deprivation. That
is only a slight decline from 2.59 billion in 1981. (World Bank, 2014)
The situation is, however, more complicated than simply listing statistics
that show the poverty levels of different countries. The Bank itself notes

Introduction 3
that in ‘some developing countries, we continue to see a wide gap – or in

some cases – widening gap between rich and poor, and between those who
can and cannot access opportunities’ (ibid.). That is, the comparative rates
of poverty within developing countries vary enormously, but then they do
also in many developed countries. The UK’s Office of National Statistics
produces annual tables and reports on comparative wealth and depriva-
tion, such as the Atlas of Deprivation (2011), and similar studies in the
USA demonstrate that in both of those countries the gap between a small
number of wealthy individuals and a much larger proportion of poorer
people is widening (United States Census Bureau, 2014). This leads to a
series of rhetorical questions:
1. What is good governance?

2. What is the purpose of good governance and how do we recognize it?
3. Can we measure it?
4. What is the purpose and role of public administration?
5. Is it to simply carry out the wishes of the government and control the
delivery of services deemed necessary by the government?
6. Or is it to establish institutions and procedures to alleviate inequalities
of wealth and power, and deliver services that ameliorate the depriva-
tion of poverty?
7. Can we plan these things strategically in terms of policy-making and
public administration (Lusk and Birks, 2014)?
8. Or is public administration something more than any of this? Is it
fundamental to the understanding of a nation’s role and status, and
does it reflect the broader social and political context?
In terms of question 6, it is worth recalling the statistic that Europe, with

just over 7 per cent of the world’s population and about a quarter of its
economy, accounts for half the global spending on welfare; in many of the
poorer member states of the EU welfare is being paid for only by virtue
of the largess (or self-interest) of the richer Northern countries (Hillman,
2014). In such a scenario, when combined with the statistics on global
poverty, the many and varied answers to the questions listed above incite
contention.
The International Handbook of Public Administration and Governance
is intended to provide a guide to and explanation of the concepts of and
influences on governance and public administration. It cannot provide
definitive answers to the above-listed questions, but it does offer a series
of perspectives and observations to enable readers to evolve their own
perceptions of what these concepts mean and what the institutions of
government and governance are for. It is an ambitious volume replete with

contributions from eminent scholars that address the key questions of how
governments, nationally and internationally, can tackle public administra-
tion and governance challenges in an increasingly globalized world. The
international coverage of perspectives, including those from Africa, Asia,
Europe, Australia, North and South America, is a distinctive feature of
this book. It adopts contemporary perspectives of governance, including
public policy capacity, ‘wicked’ policy problems, public sector reforms,
the challenges of globalization and managing complexity. The book is in
two parts.
Part I is largely theoretical and addresses ‘Public Administration, New
Public Management and Governance: Concepts and Contestabilities’.
It begins with a scene-setting chapter by Robert Pyper that introduces
and contextualizes public administration, public management and gov-
ernance as key concepts. There is no attempt here (or anywhere in the
volume) to create a general theory of public administration, as has been
done elsewhere (Lalor, 2014); rather, Pyper provides a careful explanation
and exploration of the historical and academic context. This leads into
the original and theory-building chapter by Bouckaert. He opines that
‘governance’ as a word does not travel well between languages, but he
builds a new and beautifully constructed typology to explore the cultur-
ally defined nature of the concept. In this he confronts some of the issues
raised in this introduction, namely: whether there can be good govern-
ance without democracy; the extent of governance without government;
and the role of governance in different degrees of development. Perri 6
(Chapter 3) lays down a challenge to much of the existing usage of the
term ‘governance’ as applied to public administration. He argues that gov-
ernance theories are a merger basis for normative analysis of institutions,
and that government institutions do not govern alone, with command
being a blunt and often crude instrument. He wants to move public
administration beyond governance theory. In Chapter 4 Rhodes and
Tiernan (the former of whom 6 had disagreed with in terms of multi-level
governance and other concepts) look again at the different approaches to
executive government, teasing out where the study of executive govern-
ment in political science intersects with the study of governance in public
administration. The authors question the capacity of government by con-
centrating on what they refer to as four puzzles: predominant or collabo-
rative leadership; central capability or implementation; formal or informal
coordination; and political accountability or webs of accountability. Part
I concludes with the chapter by Wolfgang Drechsler (Chapter 5), which
offers a glimpse into the paradigms of non-Western public administration
and governance, a glimpse that develops into a more sustained scrutiny in
Part II. Drechsler explores non-Western public administration, in particu-

Introduction 5
lar the Islamic and Chinese paradigms, arguing that we can arrive more
easily at good public administration if we accept that there are different
contexts and (legitimately) different goals. He wrestles with the kind of
issues raised by the questions posed in this introduction, and concludes
that perhaps we can best advance by accepting that different places have
different narratives; we can progress through different paths with different
goals and (perhaps) different destinations.
Part II, ‘International Perspective of Public Administration, New Public
Management and Governance’, delivers a series of country and regional
specific analyses of governance and public administration, drawing upon
the issues and perspectives outlined in Part I. In particular, the chapters
look at change and challenges, with Robert Cameron (Chapter 6) charting
the journey in South Africa from the apartheid regime to the successive
administrations under the African National Congress and that movement’s
embrace of new public management (NPM). As he notes, the ‘major chal-
lenge was to move from a state that provided services predominantly to a
small white constituency to one that also provided decent services to the
disadvantaged black majority’. The South African government opted to
adopt administrative delegation, performance management and corpora-
tization, but Cameron’s analysis suggests that these NPM techniques have
not travelled particularly well and we require a more nuanced approach
rooted in the domestic context of the nation to effect reform that delivers
positive outcomes. Ahmed Badran (Chapter 7) takes readers to the other
end of the African continent and examines public administration reform
and governance in Egypt. Here, as in other emerging economies, he argues,
‘reforming state machinery and public bodies has been regarded as a means
for achieving broader social and economic developmental goals’. In a
strategic review of the Egyptian public sector from a political-economy
perspective, he charts its development through the various welfarist and
regulatory phases up to and beyond the 2011 revolution, noting the dif-
ficulties associated with meeting the competing demands upon it and the
power of the elite to frustrate change. We cross continents with Donald
Savoie (Chapter 8) to explore the impact of globalization and the desire
of Canadian politicians to ‘grab hold of the policy-making levers and to
become less dependent on career public servants for policy advice’; he notes
that ‘the push to have public sector managers emulate their private sector
counterparts has knocked the public service off its traditional moorings’.
The impact of these reforms on Canada’s public administration has been to
try to emulate the private sector, but this has not been entirely successful.
This is unsurprising because, as Pyper points out in Chapter 1, the whole
purpose of public administration is to do different things at different levels
of transparency and accountability from private companies.

Crossing the border, Andranovich and Anagnoson (Chapter 9) deliver

a magisterial review of the issues and challenges to public administration
and governance in the USA. The role of the executive, contested through-
out US history, its relationship to the other parts of government and to
the citizenry, is explored through the prism of public administration and
governance. The authors map the changing size and structures of the US
public administration, focusing on the pinch points dealing with various
‘wicked’ issues. They conclude that ‘the reasons why the public sector is
not functioning well in the USA are not fundamentally administrative –
they are political. With the country roughly equally divided between
Republicans and Democrats, between those seeking a significantly smaller
government with fewer services as opposed to a larger government with a
significant array of services, public administrators and executive branches
are caught in the middle.’ Traversing the Darien Gap to reach Brazil, the
chapter from Gomes and Secchi (Chapter 10) demonstrates again the issues
confronting a country with a large public sector, a large population and
huge disparities of wealth and power. But they remind us that, although
much of Brazil may look like a developing or emergent economy, it is the
world’s seventh-largest economy and is set to continue to grow quickly.
In that sense Brazil is grappling with the challenges of economic success
combined with continuing poverty. The country’s public administration is
central to addressing these issues. The authors demonstrate the intricacies
of a public sector that, like the country itself, is large and diverse. Unlike
the policy transfer of NPM ideas in other countries, though, some of the
experiments in wider public participation in policy-making and service
delivery are genuinely novel. The ‘Brazilian participation experiences are
unique – born, tested and improved locally. There was no inspiration
from foreign literature or foreign experiences of public governance, or
policy networks or co-production.’ Guillermo Cejudo (Chapter 11) takes
a broader perspective and assesses public administration more region-
ally from a wide Latin American perspective. He explores the different
trajectories that countries in the region have followed since emerging from
dictatorship. The chapter debates why some democracies find it difficult
to reform their public administration in ways that deliver efficient services
to the widest possible clientele, while other ‘third-way’ democracies have
been relatively more successful in transforming government and creating
professional bureaucracies. The author provides illuminating case studies
evaluating these issues, concentrating on Mexico, Chile and Argentina.
His analysis again demonstrates the importance of political structures
and, more significantly, political constraints in delivering positive reforms.
Krishna Tummala delivers a review of and explanation for develop-
ments in Indian public administration (Chapter 12). Like Brazil, India

Introduction 7
is huge, accounting for 1.2 billion people and an economy that is the
world’s fourth largest and still growing. It is diverse (22 constitutionally
recognized languages) in terms of ethnicity, religion and geography. Yet,
despite having concentrations of wealth and power, it also has deep and
abiding poverty. The colonial civil service inherited from the British was
transformed in the years following independence and used to construct
and attempt to implement a series of five-year plans under the direction
of Indian socialism. The chapter charts the development of the modern
Indian public administration, but does not shrink from exposing the bleak
picture framed by corruption and the illegal activities of politicians, activi-
ties that have stunted and blunted reform. Suggestions for further reform
and shafts of administrative ‘sunshine’ conclude the chapter. We then
cross the Himalayas for a review and analysis of the second Asian giant in
the chapter by Zhichang Zhu on China (Chapter 13). This chapter reso-
nates with the issues raised by Drechsler, with Zhu exploring the Chinese
bureaucratic tradition and the impact of the historical legacy of centralized
authoritarianism. Inherent to the modern reforms is the tradition, current
throughout ancient and modern history, that the role of government had
no boundaries. Zhu concludes by analysing the reasons for the post-Mao
reforms and their mixed success, noting that, even when China borrows
an idea from elsewhere, it adapts it for the specific Chinese context. This
means that ‘China’s reform has displayed historical continuity as well as
skilful learning from the West’.
John Halligan begins his chapter (Chapter 14) on public sector reform
in Australia by noting that developing ‘government capacity to address
complex and intractable problems has become increasingly a priority
for Australian central government’. Australian federal and state govern-
ments have been innovative in the measures and structures developed
over the last 30 years, and have been at the forefront of developing new
institutions and procedures to deliver services and achieve a set of desired
national outcomes from the country’s public administration. As one of
the anglophone countries, Australia was quick to adapt its administrative
structures during the fashion for NPM, but it was also in the lead to move
on from these structures and reform them to develop capacity to deliver
modern services through collaboration and shared outcomes. The second
of our Australian chapters takes many of the points raised by Halligan
and develops them to explore how Australia’s innovative approach to
bureaucratic reform developed capacity to address and manage ‘wicked
issues’, including the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous peoples. In
this chapter (Chapter 15), Brian Head and Janine O’Flynn argue that the
reforms led to great tensions at the heart of Australian governance, with
increased contestability in terms of the sources of policy advice. One of the

lessons learned (and there have been many) is the need for coordination
and something of a return (where applicable in a federal system) to central
government exercising strategic direction.
Dion Curry, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Sebastian Jilke and Steven
van de Walle contribute a chapter (Chapter 16) that examines European
public sector reform via an overview of public administration in Europe.
The second half of the chapter discusses key trends such as outcome/
result orientation, downsizing, contracting out, transparency, open-
ness, e-government and citizen participation, among others. The authors
highlight the similarities and differences regarding these issues across
European countries, pointing out the diversity of public administration
origins across the continent: Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Roman and
Napoleonic. To illustrate these points they use several case countries:
Norway, Estonia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany,
Austria, Spain and the UK. Based on extensive original research, the
authors chart and analyse the reforms across Europe and conclude that
the nature and extent of public administration reforms vary greatly. Some
of these variations follow traditional North/South, East/West divides, but
since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expansion of the EU, such distinc-
tions are much less marked than before. The context of reform remained
the most important factor, reflecting the robustness of each country’s
political system in terms of good governance and also the way in which
they were affected by the global financial crisis. Chapter 17, by Stanka
Setnikar Cankar and Veronika Petkovšek, focuses on one of the world’s
newer countries, Slovenia, which emerged from the breakup of the former
Yugoslavia. As a member of the EU, Slovenia has benefited from EU
assistance and has received guidance on reconfiguring its public sector,
but the impact of the financial crisis had a highly damaging impact on the
country and the most recent reforms have demonstrated the way in which
a small country with a vulnerable economy has acted in concert with EU
institutions to rebuild confidence and competitiveness. Nearly all recent
reform has been driven by the belief in the need for austerity measures.
Duncan McTavish (Chapter 18) outlines the traditional configuration of
UK public administration before assessing the impact of NPM reforms
and the development of regulatory audit and inspection regimes. He con-
cludes by evaluating the UK’s public administration within the new com-
plexity of devolved administrations, the impact of the EU and broader
global dynamics. The UK adoption of NPM was ‘more systemic and
thorough than in other countries, and the ideational and ideological drive
was clear: the accentuation of management, often transferred in from the
business sector; cost control and discipline; competition; privatization
and use of market mechanisms; efficiency and modernization leading to

Introduction 9
a separation of policy and m anagement of delivery through agencies and

arm’s-length bodies’. But, as he makes clear, there has been very little
systematic evaluation of the success of the reforms in terms of their stated
intention: value for money; greater efficiency; effectiveness; and economy.
In short, we know there has been transformative change, but we do not
know if it has worked according to its original criteria, let alone more
up-to-date measures, however defined.
This returns us to our original questions at the beginning of this chapter.
We conclude the book (Chapter 18) with a summary of its main points and
lessons to be drawn from our global journey. We draw out examples, as we
see them, of good practice and good governance. While the book does not
amount to a paean in praise of bureaucracy per se, we are supporters of
good bureaucracy: good in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, professional
merit-based appointments and, above all, integrity and broad account-
ability to citizens. Indeed, good governance necessitates good administra-
tive and political institutions serving its citizenry. That is, after all, the
basis of good governance and, without that, civilization, indeed humanity,
cannot flourish.
REFERENCES
Burke, E. (1991), The Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Peter Stanlis, New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
Fraser-Moleketi, G. (2005), The World We Could Win: Administering Global Government,
Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Fukuyama, F. (2013), ‘What is governance?’, Governance, 26(3), 347–68.
Fukuyama, F. (2014), http://governancejournal.net.
Halabi, Y. (2004), ‘The expansion of global governance into the Third World: altruism,
realism, or constructivism?’, International Studies Review, 6, 21–48.
Hillman, N. (2014), ‘Debate: reforming state welfare’, Public Money and Management, 34(3),
159–61.
Kuhlman, S. and Wollman, H. (2014), Introduction to Comparative Public Administration:
Administrative Systems and Reforms in Europe, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA,
USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Lalor, S. (2014), A General Theory of Public Administration, Dublin: Lalor.
Lusk, S. and Birks, N. (2014), Rethinking Public Strategy, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Office of National Statistics (2011), http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171780_239839.pdf.
United States Census Bureau (2014), https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p60–248.pdf.
Vidmar, J. (2012), ‘South Sudan and the international legal framework governing the emer-
gence and delimitation of new states’, Texas International Law Journal, 47(3), 547–59.
World Bank (2014), http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview.

PART I
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION, NEW
PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
AND GOVERNANCE:
CONCEPTS AND
CONTESTABILITIES

1. Public administration, public
management and governance
Robert Pyper
This chapter introduces and contextualizes public administration, public

management and governance as key concepts with fundamental structural
and operational implications for government and public policy. It sets out
a historical perspective on the paradigm shifts encapsulated in the move-
ment from public administration to (new) public management to govern-
ance, while arguing for the continued importance of public administration
as an overarching paradigm. It summarizes the consequences and impli-
cations of these shifts, and categorizes the major academic and political
critiques of the theory and practice contained within the paradigms. The
need for caution regarding uncritical acceptance of supposed international
ubiquity, or even national consistency, is stressed and significant diver-
gence from assumed ‘norms’ in certain parts of the globe and, over time,
within certain states, is noted. Finally a series of ‘sub-concepts’ is exam-
ined in order to determine the extent to which they represent significant
refinements and developments of the major themes, or have the status of
passing fads and fashions.
KEY CONCEPTS, HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND

PARADIGM SHIFTS
In one simple and straightforward form of analysis, it is possible to view

the key concepts that form the subject of this chapter as stages of linear
development in a chronological and historical context, and also in terms
of paradigmatic shifts. Thus, to coin a phrase, public administration begat
public management, which in turn begat governance. The weaknesses of
such a sweeping generalization are immediately apparent, however. In
the real world of government, there are major overlaps between develop-
mental phases, and, in practice, there is no neat and clean succession of
modes or regimes. Additionally, the academic paradigms are significantly
more complex than these shifts would suggest, and, in particular, it can be
argued that, depending upon the prevailing mode of analysis, governance
is both an element within public administration and public management,
13

and also one among several possible ‘successors’ to the latter (as discussed
below).
An alternative, and more useful, approach is to view public adminis-
tration not merely as a description of a rather traditional, historic mode
of government whose time has come and gone, but as an overarching
paradigm within which we can locate subsequent developments, including
public management and governance. This can help us come to terms with
the continued deployment of the term ‘public administration’ as a working
description of the organizational settings for government. Public admin-
istration continued to be the default description of the central and local
structures, systems and processes established for the creation of policy and
the delivery of public services in many parts of the globe, long after the
apparent embrace of (new) public management by the Anglo-Americans.
However, the persistence of the term can be seen even in states such as the
UK, where it is often assumed that public administration has been super-
seded by public management and its new variants. To cite one example:
the existence of a select committee of the UK Parliament with a focus on
public administration is indicative of something more than a reluctance to
rename the body; this speaks to the continued utility of the concept.
Some critics have argued, convincingly, that the new public manage-
ment (NPM) was really a sub-species of public administration, and its
effects were restricted due to, inter alia, the relative poverty of its concep-
tual and theoretical bases, the weaknesses of its claims of novelty, and the
lack of evidence to support its prescriptions for improved organizational
and societal outcomes (see, e.g., Pollitt, 1990; Frederickson and Smith,
2003).
Public administration is a multifaceted concept, with some key features
at its core. As a discipline, it encompasses, inter alia:
● administrative theories
● the history of public sector bodies
● biographical studies of civil servants and other public officials
● organizational and institutional arrangements for service delivery
● relationships between officials and politicians, and between both of
these and the public
● modes of accountability and control
● citizens’ rights of access to public bodies and the information they
hold
● policy making and implementation
● public finance and budgeting
● public sector performance (and the measurement and evaluation
thereof)

15
Public administration, public management and governance
● management and leadership in public sector organizations

● human resource management and labour relations in the public
sector
● professional development, education and training for public officials
● national and international comparative studies of governmental
organizations
(adapted from Caiden et al., 1983: xiv–xv and Massey, 1993: 9–10).
Traditionally, much of the focus of public administration was on the

workings of government departments at central and local levels, and state-
run entities including nationalized industries. The hierarchical, rule-bound
public administration systems favoured by Max Weber and Woodrow
Wilson as a means to insulate officialdom at central and local levels from
the corruption of raw politics evolved over time to become more fluid
and flexible, and increased recognition came to be given to the subtle-
ties of systems within which the exercise of significant, though account-
able, influence could be wielded by ‘street-level bureaucrats’. However,
notwithstanding this evolution, in the historical context, as the boundaries
between the public and private sectors became increasingly blurred (due in
part to increased interdependencies and privatizations of some state enti-
ties), and as the influence of private sector business approaches to manage-
ment and organization increased, public administration came to be viewed
in some quarters as a somewhat outdated concept. In this perspective, it
was seen as rule-bound and inflexible, paying insufficient attention to the
attractions of new modes of thinking and approaches to the practice of
running large and complex organizations.
These developments brought challenges to, and refinements of, public
administration. The reaction to three successive, yet overlapping, chal-
lenges brought about significant changes. The first challenge dated from
the late 1950s and early 1960s, and had as its main focus the need to
modernize systems and processes, particularly in relation to budgeting,
policy making and analysis, and the associated managerial imperatives.
The new, modern approaches often required new types of people in
government, and in the USA, the appointment to the Kennedy admin-
istration of Robert S. McNamara as Defense Secretary was indicative
of this. McNamara brought into government a combination of systems
analysis based on his statistical work in the US Airforce during the
Second World War, and finely honed business and management skills
from his work as president of the Ford Motor Company. Despite his
Republican background, his modern managerial credentials meant that
he was ‘on everybody’s list of candidates’ for a job in the administration
of the new Democrat president, and he was considered suitable for either

the Treasury or Defense (Dallek, 2003: 312). Under McNamara, the

US Defense Department’s internal processes rapidly became a model of
modernization in public administration (see Shapley, 1993). In the UK, at
the same time, the Plowden Report (Plowden Committee, 1961) examined
new systems for the control of public expenditure in the broader context
of modernizing management in government, and the latter theme was
picked up subsequently in the Fulton Report (Fulton Committee, 1968)
and the Heath government’s White Paper, The Reorganisation of Central
Government (HM Government, 1970). During this phase, the challenge
associated with adopting more rational and strategic approaches to policy
making and evaluation
coincided with, and was part of, a period of ‘high modernism’ when rapid
advances in science and technology, combined with a huge growth in the
university-based study of the social sciences, seemed to hold out the promise
of a more rational ‘designed’ set of public policies and institutions. (Pollitt and
Bouckaert, 2011: 6)
In the second phase, broadly spanning the late 1960s to the late 1970s, the
challenge was to produce new ways of organizing and managing the busi-
ness of the state in the face of socioeconomic crises and apparent ‘over-
load’ and ‘ungovernability’ (the title and content of King, 1976, although
UK focused, spoke to a global malaise). The reaction to this challenge
saw serious concerns arise in relation to the ‘machinery of g overnment’,
and the launch of waves of structural and managerial reforms, many
of which continued well into the 1980s and beyond. In the UK and the
USA, the search for greater coordination of policy making and imple-
mentation and economies of scale saw moves to create ‘giant’ government
departments (in the UK context, typified by the huge Department of the
Environment), and the spread of ‘rational’ approaches to policy analy-
sis and budgeting (including the proliferation of planned, programmed
budgeting systems (PPBS) and the search for value for money (VFM)).
As the vogue changed, structural ‘giantism’ gave way to a new preference
for discrete organizational units with their own performance regimes and
specific service delivery foci. The creation of multiple executive agencies,
influenced significantly by the Swedish model of government (although
always with specific local variations), could be seen throughout the globe
as the 1980s progressed. In the UK context, this process was encapsulated
within the ‘Next Steps’ initiative (Efficiency Unit, 1988).
Christopher Hood captured the meaning and impact of this second
phase in his seminal work charting the impact of the new managerial-
ism on public administration, and setting out the fundamental changes
taking place in the functioning of public service organizations. Inter alia,

17
there would be increased emphasis on the disciplined use of resources,

greater managerial autonomy and ‘flexibilities’, competition via tender-
ing and contractualization, disaggregation through structural change and
privatization, and the application of performance standards and meas-
urement (Hood, 1991: 4–5). Public management, or new public manage-
ment (NPM), had become the titular embodiment of the paradigm shift
that encapsulated the approaches taken by the Thatcher and Reagan
governments in the UK and USA respectively in the early 1980s, spread
to Australia and New Zealand by the middle of that decade, and then
became current across the globe (although see below for a cautionary note
regarding assumed ubiquity),
driven partly by the forces of globalization and by international organiza-

tions dominated by the same countries, but also nationally by conservative
and n eo-liberal parties, in some cases in collaboration with mainstream social
democratic parties. (Christensen and Lægreid, 2010b: 1)
Even as this happened, however, the third challenge had emerged, and
from the mid-1980s onwards the reaction to this led to a new phase of
development for public administration. As the mix of public, private and
‘third sector’ bodies and agencies with an involvement in policy making
and delivery expanded and developed, so the complexities associated with
coordination, ‘joining up’ and securing adequate accountabilities, regula-
tion and control became increasingly acute. Influenced to some extent by
the elements of the international relations literature, which sought to make
sense of the ‘complex interdependencies’ in that sphere (e.g. the work of
Keohane and Nye on power and interdependence – see 4th edn, 2011),
public administration analysts began to stress the importance of under-
standing the interactions between governmental and non-governmental
organizations in terms of networks (an early theoretical exposition of
networks can be found in Knoke and Kuklinski, 1982, and a useful
summary of the development of the theory in Enroth, 2011). Networks
could be relatively closed (the ‘iron triangles’ in the USA, wherein govern-
ment departments or agencies, Congressional committees and dominant
lobbies or interest groups effectively incorporated key policy spheres)
or open (wide and shifting arrays of departments, formal and informal
interest groups from the public, private and third sectors). The literature
on network theory and practice expanded beyond its US base, reflecting
the increasing utility of the concepts (in the UK context, see, e.g., Jordan,
1990; Rhodes, 1990; Marsh and Rhodes, 1992).
The diffusion and fragmentation seen as a consequence of the
increased significance of networks led to further theoretical and concep-
tual insights, including the ‘hollowing-out’ thesis. This saw governments

‘lose’ policy functionality ‘upwards’ (to state and transnational organi-

zations, including foreign powers, the World Bank and multinational
corporations), ‘downwards’ (to privatized and contractualized elements
of the system), and ‘outwards’ (to arm’s-length bodies such as execu-
tive agencies – key sources on all of this are Rhodes, 1994, 1997). The
‘differentiated polity’ thesis focused on the effect of decentralization,
subsidiarity and devolution on policy making and delivery, again adding
to the impression of functional disaggregation and fragmentation (see
Rhodes et al., 2003).
These theoretical and analytical approaches were closely associated
with the broader governance paradigm. Influenced by the analyses of
Kooiman (1993) and Pierre and Peters (2000) (their 2000 work best
captures the development of their ideas), Rhodes (1997) summarized the
shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in terms of a new focus on the
network interactions between politicians and officials (‘government’) and
the non- governmental actors. The increased importance of networks,
reduced role for government in some spheres, proliferation of managerial
initiatives, and continuing programmes of organizational and institutional
reform were key features of the new mode. Within this developmental
phase of public administration, the concept of governance emerged as a
response to the challenge of increasingly complex governmental and soci-
etal interactions. There was a perceived need to ‘re-engineer’ or ‘reinvent’
government. These concepts initially assumed particular significance in
the USA following the publication of work by public management con-
sultants David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992).
Their definition of ‘governance’ was broad. It was
the process by which we collectively solve our problems and meet our society’s
needs. Government is the instrument we use. The instrument is outdated and
the process of reinvention has begun. (Ibid.: 24)
Their work both reflected changing realities in the practice of governance

at all levels of the USA, and also influenced policy makers in the Clinton
administration (see Aberbach and Rockman, 2001). The ‘reinventing gov-
ernment’ agendas spread rapidly beyond the USA, with the core idea from
Osborne and Gaebler that the fundamental role of government should
be to ‘steer’ policy delivery rather than attempt to do the ‘rowing’ itself.
This built upon the basic theses of NPM, recognized the vital importance
of networks, and aligned with the increasing emphasis being given to
service performance comparisons, competition among service providers,
optimizing managerial practices, treating service users as customers with
rights and expectations, decentralizing decisions on delivery mechanisms

19
and modes, enhancing accountability for outcomes, and, of course, the

perennial search for the ‘right’ organizational structures.
Governance theory became increasingly complex, as it moved beyond a
‘first wave’ with its focus on networks, to a ‘second wave’ of ‘metagovern-
ance’ (see Jessop, 2011) in which the state seeks to secure ‘coordination in
governance . . . [by] its use of negotiation, diplomacy and more informal
modes of steering’ (Bevir and Rhodes, 2011: 206), and on to the ‘third
wave’ of the ‘stateless state . . . a decentred approach [which] focuses
on the social construction of patterns of rule through the ability of indi-
viduals to create meanings in action’ (ibid.: 209). Curiously, and slightly
confusingly, one of the proponents of the deconstructed, decentred ‘third
wave’ that has supposedly superseded the phases of governance in which
networks and the ‘steering state’ existed also argues, separately, that
networks and steering have a continuing currency in ‘global governance’
(‘the management of transnational issues by international organisations
and other non-state actors as well as by sovereign states’ – Bevir and Hall,
2011: 352). Does the post-structuralist, postmodern, quasi-Foucaultian
search for meaning in social constructs within a ‘stateless state’ apply only
at national level?
Notwithstanding this, the novelty of governance as a fresh feature of
public administration could be overstated. Arguably, ‘good governance’,
in the specific, focused sense of proper decision- making procedures,
recognized standards of conduct for politicians and officials, and robust
mechanisms of accountability and control had always been a key element
of sound public administration. The ubiquity of this application of the
term has been noted:
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund make loans conditional
on ‘good governance’. Climate change and avian flu appear as issues of ‘global
governance’. The European Union issues a White Paper on ‘Governance’. The
US Forest Service calls for ‘collaborative governance’. (Bevir, 2011b: 1)
For the United Nations (United Nations Economic and Social Commission
for Asia and the Pacific, 2006) the eight key features of good governance
were accountability, orientation in consensus, efficiency and effective-
ness, equitability and inclusivity, participation, respect for the rule of law,
responsiveness and transparency.
THE PERSISTENCE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Beyond this, even in the context of the wider application of the governance
concept, to encapsulate the complex interdependencies of networks, some

analysts argued that the era of ‘traditional government’, with its emphasis
on ‘rowing’ as well as ‘steering’, could be seen as something of an aberration,
with the historical norm actually being much closer to the modern govern-
ance mode than might be assumed. Thus, for example, in the UK context,
observers charting the renewed emphasis on governance in Whitehall in the
late 1990s (Lowe and Rallings, 2000) noted that the role and functioning
of government in the UK in the post-Second World War period could be
viewed as an exception: the importance of networks and complex interac-
tions between officials at different levels of the system of government, and
across sectors, could be discerned in the public administration of the early
part of the twentieth century, and was now being given renewed life.
Even in the context of the post-Second World War growth of the
central state, it could be argued that the public administration systems
this engendered were replete with examples of organizational innovation
and working across complex networks. As one proponent of the values of
bureaucracy within public administration has pointed out:
establishing the National Health Service, a new social security system, the
expansion of education at all levels and the nationalization of the major public
utilities could hardly be considered to lack the qualities of managerial initiative
and enterprise. (Du Gay, 2005: 4)
The continuing importance and value of bureaucracy, as a feature of

public administration can be used to place the NPM and governance
developments in context. While it is ‘almost unimaginable for a politician
. . . to stand for re-election on a pro-bureaucracy ticket’ and ‘contempo-
rary public administrators found it very difficult to give voice to the values
of Weberian public bureaucracy without appearing to be old fashioned,
anachronistic and irrelevant’ (du Gay, 2005: 2), it can be argued that there
has been a growing recognition of the risks associated in particular with
NPM’s focus on specific, limited aspects of the challenges of governing
and delivering services. Rhodes (1994: 151) had predicted some ‘returns
to bureaucracy’:
Bureaucracies have demonstrable advantages, including reliability, predictabil-

ity, probity, cohesion and continuity. Above all, they provide direct, hands-on
control of services through the hierarchical, rule-based, disciplinary structure.
These characteristics favour intervention. Should any future government rail
against the constraints of fragmented service delivery systems and seek to steer,
the tool it will turn to will be bureaucracy. A government with redistributive
aims will have obvious incentives to intervene but if there is the potential for
catastrophe then the political complexion of the government will be irrelevant.
Needs must where the devil drives, and foundering service delivery systems
carry a high electoral penalty.

21
Rhodes’s prediction became particularly apposite as governments searched

for coordinated, joined-up approaches as means to overcome the challenges
resulting from disaggregation and fragmentation. In some cases the value of
bureaucracy was reasserted as coordinating mechanisms struggled with the
task of asserting control and order over increasingly complex policy fields.
There was a renewed interest in the policy contexts of bureaucracies, exem-
plified in the UK context by the work of Page and Jenkins (2005). Peters
(2004) recognized the attraction for governments of the idea of ‘rebuild-
ing the state’ and reasserting the values of centralism in a more traditional
public administration framework. The dangers of an unthinking attempt
to resurrect a supposed golden age were recognized, however. Taking an
example of sound practice from Finland, where the 2004 ‘Government
Programme’ system attempted to deploy a civil service reform programme
as a means to reassert control over fragmented departments and create
‘horizontal governance’, Lodge and Kalitowski (2007: 29) identified a range
of evidence of alternative approaches in which civil service systems
are looking for ways to improve central governance capacity and to reassert
some control and coherence over the state. The tricky part is to develop a strat-
egy that does not simply see them returning to the status quo ante. A return
to the . . . days of hierarchical and rigid government is not the answer. Nor,
indeed, should the quest for greater coherence result in over-centralisation.
Instead, civil services need to rethink the role of the centre and the part civil
services should play.
The fluid nature of public administration can be illustrated with reference

to the shifts over time between private and public sector ownership. In
the UK context, for example, during the 30 years following the end of the
Second World War, the iron and steel industry shifted from one sector to
the other and back again. State ownership of the major public utilities was
secured in the 1940s, but while the superficial impression might be that
large elements of the former public sector were transferred permanently
into the hands of the private sector during the 1980s and early 1990s, the
reality was much more complex. The model of privatization deployed
involved creating an enhanced role for government through the expan-
sion in the numbers of regulatory agencies overseeing the former public
utilities. As the sands continued to shift, UK Treasury civil servants
found themselves involved in the running of new ‘nationalized indus-
tries’. Reflecting on the nationalization of the failing bank, Northern
Rock, in February 2008, Simon Jenkins pointed to other examples in this
countervailing trend:
Railtrack plc was nationalised by Labour as Network Rail in 2001 and the
Tube firm Metronet was nationalised last year at a cost of £1.7 billion . . .

they were unequivocally private companies and they are now unequivocally
nationalised enterprises. (Jenkins, 2008)
In the UK (and in other states facing the consequences of the post-2008

global financial meltdown), the move to large or majority government
shareholding in banks and effective renationalization of rail routes in the
face of financial crises and failed privatizations demonstrated that ‘returns
to bureaucracy’ could and would happen at times of acute governmental
and societal crises. Beyond this, in a demonstration of the inherent link-
ages between the concepts and paradigms, as we note below when citing
the work of Pierre and Rothstein (2011), there is some evidence to suggest
that early, Weberian forms of public administration, with their emphasis
on rules and hierarchies, can be important (but all too often ignored)
foundations for the successful implementation of NPM reforms.
THE DANGERS OF ASSUMED UBIQUITY
When discussing changes to the meaning and understanding of public

administration, it is important to stress that caution is required in making
assumptions about the broad or even universal application of the changes
falling under the headings of public management and governance.
It is also sensible to exercise some caution in relation to the degree of
intentionality behind such changes. Analysts have emphasized the key
roles played by elites in public service reform processes. The composition
of the elites (broadly defined as political executives and senior officials)
may alter, they are often influenced by external factors (‘ideas’ and ‘pres-
sures’, including, in recent times, globalization and the international
financial crises), and their plans are subject to unintended consequences
and distortions during implementation within the structures and substruc-
tures of the political system. However, reform ‘tends to begin in the upper,
rather than the lower reaches of governance’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2011: 33). Citing the work of Goodin (1996) on the theory of institutional
design, Pollitt and Bouckaert argue that:
it is the exception rather than the rule for reform schemes to be comprehensive,
even in intent. Reformers try to improve this or that institution or programme,
or sometimes a whole sector (health, education), but they seldom attempt to
remodel the entire sweep of public sector institutions in one go. (Pollitt and
Bouckaert, 2011: 34)
This is debatable, however, as it might be argued that, for example, in the

UK the Blair administration’s ‘Modernising Government’ programme

23
represented an attempt (albeit flawed) to produce a sector-wide blueprint

for reform (Prime Minister Blair, 1999), and the post-2010 UK coalition
government’s Open Public Services White Paper (HM Government, 2011)
was a similar (and arguably similarly flawed – see Painter, 2013) attempt
to provide an overarching statement of intent. Even where there is no com-
prehensive plan per se, there is usually at the minimum a broad guiding
outlook or philosophy. None the less, as Pollitt and Bouckaert rightly
point out,
it is easy to exaggerate the degree of intentionality in many reforms . . .

although . . . intentional acts of institutional redesign have been crucial . . . this
should not be read as an elevation of organizational elites into God-like design-
ers who are routinely able to realize bold and broad schemes of improvement.
(Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 34)
As the NPM and governance ideas spread, particularly during the third
developmental phase discussed above, claims of ubiquity, occasionally
accompanied by understated qualifying statements, became increasingly
common. For example, Karmarck (2003) argued that the degree of global
convergence with NPM norms was remarkable, and the publications
of the OECD (see, e.g., 2005) appeared at times to assume a universal
applicability for the tenets of NPM.
For Kettl (2000), public management reform was a worldwide phenom-
enon of ‘revolutionary’ proportions, while Lodge and Kalitowski (2007: 5)
explicitly connected civil service reform programmes to what they saw as
the global influence of NPM and modernization. Drawing on his work as
Director General of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences,
Duggett (2007: 19) was convinced that NPM and its associated ‘moderni-
zation’ and reform agendas had come by the 1990s to represent ‘a kind of
global debate where a theory . . . was in fact being tested’. Duggett further
argued that a subsequent reaction against NPM orthodoxies in the early
2000s saw the concept subjected to ‘a full-frontal assault . . . launched by
a wide range of scholars and practitioners’ (ibid.). He believed that this
process had led to agreement on a new ‘way forward’ that was taking the
form of ‘contextualized’ NPM, geared to local circumstances and needs.
Notwithstanding this, another group of analysts (see, e.g., Kickert,
1997; Pollitt, 2001; 2007; Pollitt and Bouckhart, 2011) challenged the case
that NPM and ‘modernization’ had ubiquitous status. They argued that
there had never been a single ‘NPM model’, and the design and implemen-
tation of governmental reforms across the globe during the 1990s and after
were characterized by significant degrees of variation. Developing this
argument, Massey (2007: 20) pointed out that ‘the near-universal accept-
ance of “new public management” was never as universal or as accepted

as Michael Duggett . . . suggests’. Bevir and Rhodes (2003: 83) focused on
limitations to the spread of NPM and pointed out its lack of coherence
and consistency:
the similarities in NPM are superficial, masking significant underlying differ-

ences. The trend to NPM is not universal. Rather, traditional public adminis-
tration persists in places such as the EU Commission and Germany. What is
more, the aims and results of NPM differ. In Britain, NPM aimed to create the
minimalist state. In Denmark, it aimed to protect the state. The language of
NPM obscures differences; for example, NPM covers agencification in Britain
but not in Australia . . . Several of the individual parts of NPM are not new:
for example, performance measurement. The distinctiveness of NPM could lie
in the package not the parts, but there is no uniform, agreed package. Finally,
the meaning of NPM has changed; for example, in Britain the early focus was
on cost-cutting and efficiency but later the main concern was for the consumer.
Pollitt had been sceptical about the claimed universality of NPM from the
outset, and he re-emphasized his argument in 2002 (275–6, 277):
For some years now there has been a powerful story abroad. It tells that
there is something new in the world of governance, termed ‘the New Public
Management’, ‘reinvention’, re-engineering’ or given some equally dynamic
title. This is generally presented as a formula for improving public administration
. . . From this perspective particular governments or public services can be seen
as being ‘well ahead’ or ‘lagging behind’ along what is basically a single route
to reform. [But significant studies show] a world in which, although the broad
aims of producing efficient, effective and responsive public services may have
been widely shared, the mixtures of strategies, priorities, styles and methods
adopted by different governments have varied very widely indeed.
In subsequent work, Pollitt also warned of the dangers of accepting a new

orthodoxy – ‘contextualization’ as ‘the continuation of NPM with a few
of the rough corners sanded down for those cultures where the pure form
might cause too much abrasion’ (Pollitt, 2007: 22).
Agreeing in general terms with Pollitt’s critique, Massey (2007: 20) was
none the less more sympathetic towards the idea of ‘contextualization’
provided it did not become a new dogma its own right: ‘in the modern,
post-NPM world of public administration, there is no Stalinist one-size-
fits-all; context is everything’. This approach chimed with the revisionist
perspective of Christopher Hood. Moving on from his seminal early 1990s
analysis of NPM (Hood, 1991), and revisiting his initial analysis of the
concept (Hood, 1995), he was clear that the view that NPM was a global
paradigm had been overstated.
The importance of avoiding assumptions of ubiquity and understanding
the significance of contextualization can be seen even in those states that

25
were the early adopters of NPM. The nuanced nature of specific states’
embrace of public management can be seen in the UK context, where
the period since the mid-1970s saw public service reform agendas driven
by a confluence of ideas. In broad terms, it has been argued that these
stemmed from three schools of thought (Chicago – Friedmanite; Austria –
Hayekian; Virginia – public choice theorists including Niskanen), and
formulated into the ‘reinvention’ of government around the practices
of the NPM, which were, in turn, moulded during the 1990s and 2000s
into a specifically UK reform context (described as ‘modernization’, and
encapsulating within it new concepts of ‘governance’), which incorporated
elements of European policy making and governance, as well as features of
bureaucratic statism seen most obviously in the regimes of ‘performance
targets’ (for a detailed discussion of these reform trajectories, see Massey
and Pyper, 2005: 27–39). The post-2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat
coalition has attempted to stake out new reform territory that would open
public services to an increasingly varied range of providers and lead to a
new configuration of relationships between the state and the networks of
civil society and the free market, as an explicit reaction to the perceived
bureaucratic centralism of New Labour (see HM Government, 2011).
However, early analysis of this approach suggests that the ‘bottom–up
narrative cannot disguise the fact that the Coalition partners were not
averse to top–down hierarchical governance when politically expedient’,
and there is evidence of reform synergies and continuities across the New
Labour and Coalition periods framed around ‘a curious hybrid of bureau-
cratic control and market competition’ (Painter, 2013: 7; 15). Overall,
therefore, this emphasizes the importance of avoiding over- sweeping
generalizations about the adoption of ‘global phenomena’, and the need
to look within states to identify the particular facets and features of public
administration reform programmes.
Halligan’s comparative analysis (Halligan, 2011) of the ‘Anglo-Saxon
countries’ (the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada) gives further
emphasis to the importance of understanding the specific features and
characteristics of reform processes within states. New Zealand’s approach
from the 1980s gave particular emphasis to the deployment of executive
agencies, but the challenges associated with, inter alia, fragmentation and
variations in the quality of service delivery led to ‘system rebalancing’ by
the 2000s, and NPM continued to be ‘adapted and modified’ while key
features were retained (Halligan, 2011: 87–8). In Australia, the reform
waves saw an embrace of managerialism, organizational decentralization,
and then a move to an enhanced role for the centre within an ‘integrated
governance’ approach (ibid.: 88–9). As with the other states, the Canadian
experience was coloured by path dependency (particularly the historic mix

of the Westminster model and the influences from the USA), and in this
case there was evidence of a less systematic approach to the implementa-
tion of managerial and structural reforms, with the result that there was
greater opportunity for localized initiatives (ibid.: 89–91).
Halligan’s overview of the systems he examined indicates that there has
been a move to more integrated forms of governance as a successor to the
original brand of NPM, but the key NPM features, and particularly the
performance management element, remain strong as the ‘divergence and
convergence’ across the countries continues, amidst the ‘rediscovering’ of
‘old values’ (ibid.: 95). The latter we could see as referring to the continu-
ing importance of public administration as the overarching paradigm.
Examining the experiences of a cluster of continental European states
(France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Southern European countries
collectively), Kickert (2011) also emphasizes the importance of history
and constitutional arrangements in determining the nature and form of
the varied approaches to public management reform. He argues that it is
misleading to make claims of relative ‘success’ in the adoption of key ele-
ments of NPM by, on the one hand, the Anglo-Saxon countries, and, on
the other, the continental Europeans. While the legalistic administrative
systems of Germany, the tradition of the strong central state in France,
and the overriding concerns with securing the democratic rule of law in the
Southern states with relatively recent histories of dictatorship all meant
that managerial reforms were placed in different contexts, this did not
mean that the reforms did not take place, in one form or another. In some
cases, the changes would be more obvious at the substate levels, and in all
cases, the pace and shape of the reforms would be influenced by particular,
specific circumstances (see Chapter 16). Similarly, generalizations about
the experience of the Scandinavian countries are problematic. In Norway,
Sweden and Denmark,
there are similarities but also many differences. Historical differences in the
organization of central government, different administrative cultures, differ-
ent challenges met at different points in time, as well as differences in political
constituencies in power have all shaped public sector reforms in different ways.
Each country has developed its own reform profile with different combinations
of reform components. (Hansen, 2011: 129)
The very particular nature of the reform agenda in Denmark was captured
by Greve (2006), who described the successive waves of public sector
modernization initiatives launched by successive governments from the
early 1980s onwards. These reform programmes featured the familiar
themes of contracting out, privatization, deregulation, performance man-
agement and marketization. Structural reorganizations also featured as

27
part of the modernization drives, with the whole balance of responsibili-

ties between central, regional and local government affected by the most
recent reform. By the mid-2000s, the implementation of public manage-
ment reform in Denmark was based on guidance and exhortation rather
than formal power:
Because each ministry is headed by a cabinet minister, the responsibility for

modernization lies with the individual minister in his or her own o
rganization
. . . The constitutional-
based autonomy of each ministry means that the
implementation of public management reform remains uneven as government
departments to some extent are free to determine their own public management
profile. (Greve, 2006: 167–8)
Looking beyond Europe, Australasia and the USA, NPM reforms

designed to enhance drives to democratization, economic growth and
modernized public services became key features of changing systems of
public administration in developing countries. Turner’s (2006) analy-
sis of reform in parts of Southeast Asia confirmed the significance of
local circumstances in determining outcomes. From 1991 onwards, three
states with a history of centralized government systems, the Philippines,
Indonesia and Cambodia, successively embraced programmes of decen-
tralization with the aim of improving service delivery (Turner, 2006: 265).
These states had quite different experiences, however.
What is evident in all cases is that there has not been significant policy transfer
in the initial design of decentralisation. Domestic policy actors have deter-
mined the structures of central–local relations and then invited eager donors to
contribute funding and expertise to implement their designs. Donors strongly
support decentralisation because of its association with good governance.
(Ibid.: 270)
Interestingly, the external donors saw ‘decentralization’ as an understood,

and inherently ‘good’, aspect of global NPM, while in practice the local
interpretations of decentralization were based on a range of internal
factors, including ‘culture, history, finance, time, the relative power of
different political interests, the existing nature of subnational territories,
ethnic diversity and the orientations and skills of the designers’ (ibid.).
Once again, the local context was vitally important, and the results of the
reform initiatives were ‘in large part determined by complex constellations
of country-specific factors. There is no regional model and no coercive
transfer of decentralisation policy. Indeed there is little if any policy
transfer and certainly no copying or emulation’ (ibid.: 271).
This comparative analysis concluded that the decentralization
programmes had improved the chances of citizens engaging with the

democratic process, and brought about some marginal improvements

in service delivery systems. However, these improvements were limited,
and decentralization could not be seen as ‘a magic bullet for service
delivery’.
The conclusion of another analysis of Asian experiences also empha-
sizes the importance of scepticism regarding ubiquity, and a healthy
respect for contextualization. Cheung’s account of the impact of NPM
and governance on Asian countries sees responses in these states as
shaped by domestic conditions and institutional dynamics. Asian public sector

reforms, even if donning imported NPM or ‘good governance’ clothing, or
subscribing to the language and rhetoric of global reform fashions, are still
essentially policy instruments to shore up and sustain the existing pro-state,
and very often also pro-bureaucracy regime. The lack of a major ideological or
paradigm break with the past means that governance reform or the reinvention
of public administration is pursued only to the extent of preserving pre-existing
interests and institutions. (Cheung, 2011: 143)
The continuing resonance of ‘traditional’ public administration and the

importance of local contextualization are given further emphasis in the
analysis of Pierre and Rothstein (2011). They note that the ‘good govern-
ance’ prescriptions of international organizations, including the World
Bank, the European Union and the United Nations, are at their core
‘Weberianism-oriented’ because they stress the importance of, inter alia,
‘precise and unambiguous rules; merit-based recruitment; . . . public offi-
cials less susceptible to bribery; and a transparent system of responsibility’
(Pierre and Rothstein, 2011: 409). While recognizing that the Weberian
model of public administration reflected an earlier developmental stage
of the paradigm, during which it was important for trust to be built in
institutions and public officials by creating a focus on responsible hierar-
chies, legal norms and impartiality, and effectively limiting the scope for
significant discretion on the part of particular administrators, Pierre and
Rothstein argue that the attempts by international bodies to steer develop-
ing and failed states down the path of NPM are inherently problematic.
This is due to the emphasis within NPM on ‘decentralisation, manage-
rial autonomy and clear separation of policy and operations’ (Pierre and
Rothstein, 2011: 414), all of which can work effectively only if there is
inherent trust in the system of government and public administration. It
may be that NPM-style reforms can work only if they are layered upon a
state that has as its modus operandi a Weberian understanding (universal-
ism, impersonality, impartiality) of ‘how the state should behave’ (ibid.:
416).

29
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON SUB-CONCEPTS

AND ‘NEW PARADIGMS’
Just as it might be argued that the ‘parent’, overarching paradigm of public

administration spawned public management and governance, so the latter
two can also be seen to have produced variants, sub-species and a series of
sub-concepts. Occasionally, the proponents of these sub-concepts seem to
be arguing that they are, in fact, new paradigms, which have superseded
the extant regimes of thought and practice. Such claims should be treated
with caution. The fundamental argument of this chapter has been that
the overarching paradigm of public administration continues to resonate
and have meaning even as, under its wide umbrella, the variants of public
management and governance continue to evolve. Space does not allow us to
discuss all of the sub-concepts, but it is possible to touch on some of them.
Stephen Osborne has argued that public management, or specifically
NPM, ‘has actually been a transitory stage in the evolution from tradi-
tional public administration to . . . New Public Governance’ (Osborne,
2011: 417). He acknowledges the coexistence of these paradigms, and ele-
ments of overlap between them, but argues that there is sufficient evidence
to support the case that ‘the time of NPM has . . . in fact been a relatively
short-lived and transient one between the statist and bureaucratic tradi-
tion of PA and the embryonic and pluralist tradition of NPG’ (ibid.: 419).
For Osborne, the key features of NPG are: ‘socio-political governance’;
‘public policy governance’; ‘administrative governance’; ‘contract govern-
ance’; and ‘network governance’ (ibid.: 421–2). This is effectively a syn-
thesis of the various theoretical and conceptual perspectives that emerged
within, and as offshoots from, public administration and public manage-
ment. Osborne argues that NPG is ‘neither a normative new paradigm
to supersede PA and NPM nor as “the one best way” [citing the work of
Alford and Hughes] . . . rather it is . . . a conceptual tool with the potential
to assist our understanding’ (ibid.: 420–21). Slightly confusingly, he then
goes on to make the major claim that
from being an element within the PA and NPM regimes of public policy
implementation and public services delivery, public governance has become
a distinctive regime in its own right that captures the realities of public policy
implementation and public services delivery within the plural and pluralist
complexities of the state in the twenty-first century. (Ibid.: 422)
Successive waves of governance forms and types are deployed by Janet

Newman (2011) as a means of imposing coherence and order on what she
sees as the line of succession from public administration through NPM to
governance. Thus she describes the regimes of ‘hierarchical’, ‘managerial’

and ‘network’ governance (Newman, 2011: 356–7) leading on to the

challenge of ‘self-governance’, which is
paradoxical in its political orientation, being associated both with the empow-
ered discourse of public participation and with the responsible discourse: in
offering empowerment it simultaneously responsibilises citizens to take action
on their own (and others’) behalf rather than to rely on the state. (Ibid.: 357)
Within this, the ideas of empowerment and participation, previously

examined by Newman in the context of a ‘remaking of the public sphere’
(Newman, 2005), provide a link to the concept of public value (see Moore,
1995; Bennington and Moore, 2011; Coats and Passmore, 2008), which
incorporated within public administration and public management the
strategic imperative to enhance value in a fashion similar to that found
in the private sector, where the addition of ‘shareholder value’ is an
intrinsic objective (although it should be noted that Newman’s work is
not concerned with the public value concept per se). Moore’s work laid
the foundations for the development of thinking and practice around
the concept of public value. Within this, the importance of governments
creating understandings of public values and value systems, responsible
stewardship of public assets by public managers, and the incorporation
of stakeholders within each stage of the policy process, all loom large
(Burnham and Horton, 2013: 42 effectively summarize the key features of
Moore’s prescription). The vision here is of a key role being performed by
entrepreneurial public officials. Interestingly, this was a breed identified
by Osborne and Gaebler (1992), which perhaps proves once again that
there is nothing new under the sun. Critics of the public value concept (see,
e.g., Rhodes and Wanna, 2007) have argued that the applicability of these
ideas in the US context does not guarantee transferability to other public
administration systems, where the political autonomy of public officials
is more circumscribed. Notwithstanding this, public value has attained a
certain currency, and Bennington and Moore (2011) have attempted to
make the case for transferability across systems. Stripped down to its basic
elements,
Public value argues that public services are distinctive because they are char-
acterised by claims of rights by citizens to services that have been authorised
and funded through some democratic process . . . It is designed to get public
managers thinking about what is most valuable in the service that they run and
to consider how effective management can make the service the best that it can
be . . . engaging with citizens is not an exercise in giving the public what they
want or slavishly following the dictates of public opinion polls. Public value
offers a framework for how the information gathered using these processes
should be used to improve the quality of the decisions that managers take. It

31
calls for a continuing dialogue or conversation between public managers and

citizens. (Coats and Passmore, 2008: 4)
While it is clear that public value can represent a reasonable refinement

and development of an evolving approach to public management and
governance, there would appear to be nothing in this prescription, as set
out above, that would fail to fit within a modernized approach to these
concepts within the overarching paradigm of public administration.
Public value itself certainly adds to our understanding of the complexities
and challenges associated with modern public administration. It is not a
successor paradigm in its own right.
It makes sense to view the ‘next-stage’ developmental issues for public
administration and its component elements, including public management
and governance, in terms of the particular challenges associated with
the complications flowing from the need for enhanced integration and
coordination of policy making and service delivery in a world of complex
interdependencies, sometimes confused accountability lines, increased
demands from citizens, and acute financial pressures. Is this a ‘post-NPM’
or ‘post-governance’ regime? Academics are particularly attached to the
idea that an all-encapsulating title is needed to describe any particular
developmental phase, although, as this chapter has tried to illustrate,
there are serious pitfalls associated with the use of catch-all terminology.
Perhaps the name we attach to this is less important than our attempts to
grapple with the realities of the situation. Our present preoccupation with
what Christensen and Lægreid (2011c) describe as the ‘whole of govern-
ment’ reform movement (this might be broadly interpreted as encapsulat-
ing most if not all of the ‘post-NPM/governance’ trajectories) needs to be
viewed in a longer-term perspective within which such movements can
‘gradually fade away and be supplemented or replaced by new reform
initiatives’ (Christensen and Lægreid, 2011c: 403).
NOTE
The third section of this chapter draws significantly on elements of Robert Pyper (2011),
‘Decentralisation, devolution and the hollowing out of the state’, in Andrew Massey (ed.),
International Handbook of Civil Service Systems (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA,
USA: Edward Elgar Publishing).

REFERENCES
Aberbach, Joel and Rockman, Bert (2001) ‘Reinventing government, or reinventing poli-
tics?’, in B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds), Politicians, Bureaucrats and Administrative
Reform, London: Routledge, pp. 24–334.
Bennington, John and Moore, Mark H. (eds) (2011) Public Value: Theory and Practice,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bevir, Mark (ed.) (2011a) The Sage Handbook of Governance, London: Sage.
Bevir, Mark (2011b) ‘Governance as theory, practice and dilemma’, in Mark Bevir (ed.), The
Sage Handbook of Governance, London: Sage, pp. 1–16.
Bevir, Mark and Hall, Ian (2011) ‘Global governance’, in Mark Bevir (ed.), The Sage
Handbook of Governance, London: Sage, pp. 352–65.
Bevir, Mark and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2003) Interpreting British Governance, London: Routledge.
Bevir, Mark and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2011) ‘The stateless state’, in Mark Bevir (ed.), The Sage
Burnham, June and Horton, Sylvia (2013) Public Management in the United Kingdom,
Caiden, G.E., Lover, R., Sipe, L.F. and Wong, M.M. (eds) (1983) American Public
Administration: A Biographical Guide to the Literature, New York: Garland Publishing.
Cheung, Anthony B.L. (2011) ‘NPM in Asian countries’, in Tom Christensen and Per
Laegreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate.
Christensen, Tom and Lægreid, Per (eds) (2011a) The Ashgate Companion to New Public
Management, Farnham: Ashgate.
Christensen, Tom and Laegreid, Per (2011b) ‘Introduction’, in Tom Christensen and Per
Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate,
pp. 1–13.
Christensen, Tom and Laegreid, Per (2011c) ‘Beyond NPM? Some developmental features’,
in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public
Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 391–404.
Coats, David and Passmore, Eleanor (2008) Public Value: The Next Steps in Public Service
Reform, London: The Work Foundation.
Dallek, Robert (2003) John F. Kennedy. An Unfinished Life 1917–1963, London: Allen Lane.
Du Gay, Paul (2005) ‘The values of bureaucracy: an introduction’, in Paul du Gay (ed.), The
Values of Bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–13.
Duggett, Michael (2007) ‘A new world order’, Public, May, 19–20.
Efficiency Unit (1988) Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps, London:
HMSO.
Enroth, Henrik (2011) ‘Policy network theory’, in Mark Bevir (ed.), The Sage Handbook of
Governance, London: Sage, pp. 19–35.
Frederickson, H.G. and Smith, K. (2003) The Public Administration Primer, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Fulton Committee (1968) The Civil Service (The Fulton Report), Cmnd 3638.
Goodin, R. (1996) The Theory of Institutional Design, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Greve, Carsten (2006) ‘Public management reform in Denmark’, Public Management Review,
8(1), 161–9.
Halligan, John (2011) ‘NPM in Anglo-Saxon countries’, in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid
(eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 83–96.
Hansen, Hanne Foss (2011) ‘NPM in Scandinavia’, in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid
(eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 113–30.
HM Government (1970) The Reorganisation of Central Government, White Paper, Cmnd
4506.
HM Government (2011) Open Public Services, London: Stationery Office.
Hood, Christopher (1991) ‘A public management for all seasons’, Public Administration,
69(1), 3–19.

33
Hood, Christopher (1995) ‘Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm?’

Public Policy and Administration, 10(2), 104–17.
Jenkins, Simon (2008) ‘The state is utterly clueless on the public–private divide’, The
Guardian, 20 February: 29.
Jessop, Bob (2011) ‘Metagovernance’ in Mark Bevir (ed.), The Sage Handbook of Governance,
London: Sage, pp. 106–23.
Jordan, A.G. (1990) ‘Sub-governments, policy communities and networks: refilling the old
bottles?’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2(3), 319–38.
Karmarck, E. (2003) Government Innovation Around the World, Cambridge, MA: Ash Institute
for Democratic Governance and Innovation, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Keohane, Robert and Nye, Joseph (2011) Power and Interdependence, 4th edn, London:
Pearson.
Kettl, D.F. (2000) The Global Public Management Revolution, Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press.
Kickert, W. (ed.) (1997) Public Management and Administrative Reform in Western Europe,
Cheltenham, UK and Lyme, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Kickert, Walter J.M. (2011) ‘Public management reform in continental Europe: national
distinctiveness’, in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to
New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 97–112.
King, Anthony (1976) Why Is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern? London: BBC Books.
Knoke, D. and Kuklinski, J. (1982) Network Analysis, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Kooiman, Jan (1993) Modern Governance, London: Sage.
Lodge, Guy and Kalitowski, Susanna (2007) Innovations in Government. International
Perspectives on Civil Service Reform, London: Institute for Public Policy Research.
Lowe, R. and Rallings, N. (2000) ‘Modernising Britain, 1957–64: a classic case of centrali-
sation and fragmentation?’, in R.A.W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming British Government,
London: Macmillan, pp. 99–118.
Marsh, David and Rhodes, R.A.W. (1992) Policy Networks in British Government, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Massey, Andrew (1993) Managing the Public Sector: A Comparative Analysis of the United
Kingdom and the United States, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, USA: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Massey, Andrew (2007) ‘Context is everything’, Public, July, 20.
Massey, Andrew and Pyper, Robert (2005) Public Management and Modernisation in Britain,
Moore, Mark H. (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Newman, Janet (2005) ‘Participative governance and the remaking of the public sphere’,
in Janet Newman (ed.), Remaking Governance. Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere,
Bristol: The Policy Press, pp. 119–38.
Newman, Janet (2011) ‘Serving the public? Users, consumers and the limits of NPM’, in Tom
Christensen and Per Laegreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management,
Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 349–60.
OECD (2005) Modernising Government, Paris: OECD.
Osborne, David and Gaebler, Ted (1992) Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial
Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, New York: Plume.
Osborne, Stephen (2011) ‘Public governance and public services: a “brave new world” or new
wine in old bottles?’, in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion
to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 417–30.
Page, Edward C. and Jenkins, Bill (2005) Policy Bureaucracy. Government With a Cast of
Thousands, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Painter, Chris (2013) ‘The UK Coalition government: contrasting public service reform
narratives’, Public Policy and Administration, 28(1), 3–20.
Peters, B. Guy (2004) ‘Back to the centre? Rebuilding the state’, in Andrew Gamble and
Tony Wright (eds), Restating the State, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 130–40.

Pierre, Jon and Peters, B. Guy (2000) Governance, Politics and the State, London: Macmillan.
Pierre, Jon and Rothstein, Bo (2011) ‘Reinventing Weber: the role of institutions in creating
social trust’, in Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New
Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 405–16.
Plowden Committee (1961) Control of Public Expenditure (The Plowden Report), Cmnd
1432.
Pollitt, Christopher (1990) Managerialism and the Public Services: The Anglo-American
Experience, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Pollitt, Christopher (2001) ‘Clarifying convergence: striking similarities and durable differ-
ences in public management reform’, Public Management Review, 3(4), 471–92.
Pollitt, Christopher (2002) ‘The New Public Management in international perspective. An
analysis of impacts and effects’, in Kate McLaughlin, Stephen P. Osborne and Ewan Ferlie
(eds), New Public Management. Current Trends and Future Prospects, London: Routledge,
pp. 274–92.
Pollitt, Christopher (2007) ‘One size does not fit all’, Public, June, 22.
Pollitt, Christopher and Bouckhaert, Geert (2004) Public Management Reform: A
Comparative Analysis, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pollitt, Christopher and Bouckaert, Geert (2011) Public Management Reform. A Comparative
Analysis – New Public Management, Governance and the Neo-Weberian State, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Prime Minister Blair (1999) Modernising Government, Command Paper 4310 Session
1998–99.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1990) ‘Policy networks: a British perspective’, Journal of Theoretical
Politics, 2(3), 293–317.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1994) ‘The hollowing out of the state: the changing nature of the public
services in Britain’, Political Quarterly, 65(2), 138–51.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity
and Accountability, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Rhodes, R.A.W., Carmichael, P., McMillan, J. and Massey, J. (2003) Decentralizing the Civil
Service: From Unitary State to Differentiated Policy in the United Kingdom, Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Rhodes, R.A.W. and Wanna, J. (2007) ‘The limits to public value, or rescuing responsible
government from the Platonic Guardians’, Australian Journal of Public Administration,
66(4), 406–21.
Shapley, Deborah (1993) Promise and Power. The Life and Times of Robert McNamara,
Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Turner, Mark (2006) ‘From commitment to consequences. Comparative experiences of
decentralisation in the Philippines, Indonesia and Cambodia’, Public Management Review,
8(2), 253–72.
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2006) What is
Good Governance? www.unescap.org/huset/gg/governance.htm.

2. Governance: a typology and some
challenges
Geert Bouckaert
‘Governance’ as a word does not travel well between languages. In several

non-English languages the English word is used for convenience. This
probably proves that the concept of ‘governance’ is culturally defined.
This is even more the case if the qualification ‘good’ is added. ‘Good
governance’ is supposed to be opposed to ‘bad governance’, just as in
Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government fresco in Siena’s town
hall that he painted between 1337 and 1339 (Drechsler, 2001). Governance
is therefore not only a scientific and descriptive term, but can also be a
normative concept.
Governance also emerges in the scientific community in different
ways as an agenda. Conference themes are labeled under this umbrella
(ASPA 2013: Governance & Sustainability: Local concerns, Global chal-
lenges; IPSA/AISP 2014: Challenges of Contemporary Governance),
master’s degrees are relabeled, institutes are (re)named (KU Leuven
Public Governance Institute, Leuven, Belgium; Hertie School of
Governance, Berlin, Germany), and journals are created around this
concept (Governance). ‘Governance’ becomes a general and generic
thought frame with a functional ambiguity, perhaps even with a ‘flou
académique’ (academic fog), or it becomes a ‘magic’ concept (Pollitt and
Hupe, 2011).
This chapter is about a typology of ‘governances’ defined as a ‘span
of governance’ that immediately affects definitions and content, but also
reform projects, their measurement and assessment. Within this ‘span of
governance’, changing positions are taken as priorities for reform, result-
ing in trajectories to improve the span of control of governance, within
and outside the public sector, at different levels. This ‘span of govern-
ance’ results in a range of positions that serve the purpose of Ashby’s law
of ‘requisite variety’. It provides a span of controls resulting in different
‘governances’ for different purposes (see also Andrews, 2010).
In all fields of society, governance is and will remain a crucial topic
for several reasons. First, crises require that resources, especially if
they are shrinking, should be allocated in a way that guarantees results;
the 2007–08 financial and economic crisis has affected national and
35

European governance (Ongaro, 2014; Ploom, 2014). Second, increas-

ingly, partnerships, collaboration, joint or even co-production are ways
to pool efforts to deliver services and to realize effective policies
(Verhoest et al., 2012); this requires adjusted governance. Third, activities
are shifting locations, from public to private and sometimes vice versa,
from public to not-for-profit and sometimes vice versa, within the public
sector from central to local or to Europe, or vice versa. In this context it
is crucial that the capacity for governance is guaranteed. For this reason,
it is important to identify the weakest part of the span of governance in a
specific society. It is certainly crucial to identify the weakest part within
the public sector: what level of government, what type of governance,
which organization?
This span should become the context (Pollitt, 2013) for guiding a gov-
ernance reform strategy that may include three different ideal types, such
as new public management (NPM), neo-Weberian state (NWS) and new
public governance (NPG) (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). For all these
reasons, public governance and a ‘logic of governance’ will remain on the
reform agenda, and therefore on the research agenda (Lynn et al., 2001). A
systematic overview of the span of governance allows one to identify five
types to focus on (see Figure 2.1):
1. corporate governance is about the management of public sector

organizations. The question here is to what extent, or under what
I: II: III: IV: V:

Corporate Holding Public service Suprastructure Systemic
System
- hierarchy, market, network

- Private sector - ideologies - centralized/decentralized
- NGOs - values
- Civil society - culture - GDP allocation
- Citizens
- decision making
- checks and balances
Figure 2.1 Span of governance: five types

Governance: a typology and some challenges 37
conditions, private sector corporate governance can be transferred in

order to build a solid public sector management system. Solid corpo-
rate governance is necessary but not sufficient in practice and for our
research agenda;
2. holding governance is about managing a range of organizations that
belong together and need a consolidated governance. The ‘together-
ness’ of these public sector organizations might be due, for example,
to reasons to do with territory, function, policy field, service delivery
and so on, so they need to be looked at from the point of view of the
uniqueness of their corporate governance, as well as regarding their
togetherness. Their connectedness will contribute to efficiency and
effectiveness. Solid holding governance is necessary but not sufficient
in practice and for our research agenda;
3. public service governance includes service delivery by the public
service, in collaboration with the private and not-for-profit sectors,
which must therefore have sufficient governance. Solid public service
governance is necessary but not sufficient in practice and for our
research agenda;
4. suprastructure governance refers to what is beyond institutional infra-
structure governance. Ideas, ideologies, values and culture must be
equally part of the governance agenda. This implies a two-way inter-
action between the hardware of organizations and institutions and
their software in terms of ideas, values and culture. Suprastructure
governance is necessary but not sufficient in practice and for our
research agenda;
5. systemic governance refers to the system design at the state level. This
type of macrogovernance includes the major checks and balances,
the key allocation mechanisms within a country, the core decision
making, and the distribution of power in society. Under this systemic
governance debate, three additional agendas have been added: first,
governance without democracy; second, governance without govern-
ment; and third, the effect of (economic) development on governance.
Systemic governance at the state level is certainly necessary in practice
and for our research agenda.
All these components of this span of governance are relevant and neces-
sary for all public spheres in all countries, whatever the degree of develop-
ment, culture and history. In the following, we discuss these five types of
span of governance.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN THE PUBLIC

SECTOR
Corporate governance is about the management of public sector organiza-

tions as single and autonomous entities. One of the first references in the
shift from public administration to public management was based on the
assumption that public management is about transferring private sector
techniques to public sector organizations. As Perry and Kraemer (1983: x)
put it, ‘[p]ublic management is a merger of the normative orientation of tra-
ditional public administration and the instrumental orientation of general
management’. The logic is very simple, and in its simplicity very powerful.
General management applies to the private and the public sector. It suffices
to transfer those general management principles that are already applied
in the private sector to the public sector, and we have public management.
It is not a coincidence that this idea of general ‘common’ management
is readily accepted in ‘common’ law countries where a system of general
legal principles applies to the private and the public sector. This debate
on general management has generated a wide-ranging discussion on the
differences and commonalities between public and private management.
Many management systems are subject to transfers from the private to
the public sector. This applies to very technical management systems such
as ICT, inventory management, accounting, business process engineering
or re-engineering, or certain elements of personnel management, such as
how to use function descriptions.
The literature on corporate governance is itself predominantly focused
on specific topics such as ownership structure, executive compensation,
boards of directors (their roles, duties and responsibilities), and differ-
ent cultures (Boubaker et al., 2012). The related research agenda is about
shareholders and shareholder activism, roles of directors and their com-
pensation schemes, international corporate governance with elements of
cross-border, cross-country and different cultures of political economies
(Bebchuk and Weisbach, 2012).
Good governance is defined as the ability or organizations in the private,

public and non-profit sectors to achieve their purpose in the most efficacious
manner while minimizing the need for laws, regulations, regulators, courts or
codes of so called ‘best practices’ to protect and further the interests of their
stakeholders and society. (Turnbull, 2012: 347)
At the same time, it is clear that some elements of management in the

public sector are quite distinct and different from those in the private
sector. This literature is at a significant distance from the public sector,
except for public companies, public agencies and some public–private

partnerships. In some cases this generic vision of governance, where cor-

porate governance applies to all types of organizations, is also very ideo-
logical. The conclusion may be that private and public governance may be
alike in all unimportant matters (Allison, 2012; Boyne, 2002).
The whole process of budgeting, the need for evaluation of policies, the
administrative and political leadership, the additional requirements of
accountability, the need to distinguish rights and duties of citizens and users
of public services, are some examples of why public management needs to
be different from private management, even if some general managerial
principles can be shared. This also applies to the corporate governance
codes in the public sector, which, certainly in continental European systems,
are straightforwardly embedded in administrative and public law systems.
As noted at number 1 above, a key question is to what extent private
sector corporate governance can be transferred, or under what condi-
tions it could be transferred, to a solid public sector management system.
A recent example is the case of internal audit, a rather new phenomenon
in the public sector, which takes a specific position to support internal
control systems of the executive, but which also needs to be a comple-
ment to external audit, which is a constitutional requirement supporting
the legislative. Simple copy-pasting of private sector techniques on to
the public sector is not always possible; nor is it in many cases desirable.
Adjusting methods and techniques to develop and strengthen internal
control systems should be high on the agenda to improve public govern-
ance. There are some fine examples of this, such as quality models, but
also cost accounting or agency design.
Creating quality models in the public sector was significantly inspired
by the private sector. It is interesting to see that the transfer of the value of
quality of service delivery to the public sector resulted not only in apply-
ing private sector techniques in the public sector (such as ISO, or the first
generation of EFQM (European Foundation of Quality Management)),
but also triggered specific public sector quality models (such as the
European CAF or Common Assessment Framework, or the Canadian
MAF (Management Accountability Framework) as developed by the
Treasury Board Secretariat. This even pushed private sector models to
adjust to become more generic and therefore to become applicable to the
public sector as well (such as EFQM second generation) (see Bouckaert
and Halligan, 2008).
Finally, private sector ideas and practices flow to the public sector, but
the reverse is also the case. General models of budgeting, but also more
detailed planning techniques such as developed by operational research,
have been exported from the public to the private sector (e.g. PERT –
Program Evaluation and Review Technique).

Corporate Governance Reform Programs
From the above it is possible to derive a clear reform program consisting

of concrete reform projects to upgrade corporate governance within the
public sector by improving all aspects of its management: personnel,
finance (budgeting, accounting, auditing), stock-keeping, strategy, organi-
zation, communication, leadership and so on. Implementing these projects
is already a major reform challenge in many countries.
Measuring corporate governance in the public sector

Measuring corporate governance is not straightforward, not even in the
private sector. In many cases market mechanisms, borrowing capacity
and stock exchange positions are measures of private corporate govern-
ance, mostly including corporate governance and finance. As Shleifer
and Vishny (1996: 55) state in their corporate governance survey, ‘In the
course of surveying the research on corporate governance, we tried to
convey a particular structure of the field. Corporate governance deals with
the agency problem: the separation of management and finance.’ Within
the public sector, many corporate governance score cards have been devel-
oped. Most of them are converging, some of them have real scores, and
sometimes there are awards. Most organizations have one or more models
to monitor, guide and upgrade their governance, such as ISO, Balanced
Score Cards, EFQM and CAF, or the Canadian MAF, or some sui generis
models.
In conclusion, strong corporate governance for the public and the
private sector implies that there are transfers of ideas from the private to
the public sector and vice versa, taking the features into account. Second,
our academic research should not just follow realities by explaining and
understanding them, but should also lead to new practices and result in
innovations. Finally, it is clear that a solid corporate governance in the
public sector is necessary but not sufficient. The public sector is not just a
set of disconnected single organizations. It is a connected family of organi-
zations with a shared objective. Therefore there is a need for holding
governance.
HOLDING GOVERNANCE IN THE PUBLIC

SECTOR
Holding governance is about managing a range of organizations that

belong together and need a consolidated approach. According to Metcalfe
and Richards (1987: 73–5),

[t]he critical area of public management is the management of organizational

interdependence, for example, in the delivery of services or in the management
of the budgetary process. Public management is concerned with the effective
functioning of whole systems of organizations . . . What distinguishes public
management is the explicit acknowledgement of the responsibility for dealing
with structural problems at the level of the system as a whole.
Therefore holding governance implies the responsibility for the perfor-

mance of a system of organizations. The key words are: responsibil-
ity, performance, system. Taking or getting responsibility implies being
immediately accountable. In several languages it is not straightforward to
translate the double set of words ‘responsibility/accountability’. This is cer-
tainly the case in Latin languages, but also in some others. Responsibility
refers to a grantor that allocates resources and competencies to a grantee.
Accountability refers to a grantee that provides accounts, in the broadest
meaning – financial, legal and performance. Performance has a double
meaning. It is not just about results, but also about putting something on
the stage, presenting results. In this sense, it is also about the performance
of the performance, the presentation of the results. There could be a broad
span of performance that needs a broad span of control to deliver: not
just inputs and activities (or throughput), but also output and outcome,
and ultimately trust. The broader this span of performance, the greater
the need for a broader span of control to realize it. This brings us to the
third key word: system, as a coherent set of organizations in the public
sphere and under the holding as a formally recognized set of public sector
organizations. This is more than the summation of the single organiza-
tions. Holding governance includes interactions, synergies, collaboration,
coordination and division of labor. Autonomy of single organizations
makes sense only if there is sufficient coordination. The more autonomy,
the more coordination is needed. The performance of the system depends
on the performance of individual organizations, but perhaps even more,
it depends on the coordination of these organizations. This requires
consolidation at the level of a holding.
The togetherness of these public sector organizations could have different
reasons. The holding could be on a clearly defined territory, for example all
municipal public organizations. There could also be a functional approach.
The holding could be a clearly defined policy field, for example schools and
related organizations in education, or hospitals and related organizations
in health, or police and related organizations in security. It is more difficult
to have programs that are problem related and contribute to solving a
policy problem, for example fighting poverty. Equally difficult could be a
chain of service delivery, for example food safety (from production to con-
sumption), or a clustering of service delivery around shared data sets that

contribute to this service delivery, for example in social security, or around

geo-data with GIS (Geographic Information Systems), or a financial
system at a country level (Cagniano, 2013).
The connectedness of these organizations will contribute to efficiency
and effectiveness. Different types of coordination will make a difference:
joined-up policies, horizontal and vertical coordination, transversal poli-
cies, cross-border collaboration are all variations on the general theme of
coordination. Different mechanisms are used to coordinate a range of
organizations. Hierarchy-type mechanisms (HTM), market-type mecha-
nisms (MTM), and network-type mechanisms (NTM) are very different
but share an objective to coordinate (Verhoest et al., 2012; Bouckaert
et al., 2010).
Holding governance involves being responsible and accountable for the
performance of the holding system, for example in a territorial definition.
The mayor of a city is responsible and accountable, not just for the munici-
pal organization in the strictest sense, but for all public organizations
under the municipal umbrella. Difficulties arise for a functional holding,
such as education or health, and for a policy program holding. In all cases
the issue of leadership, especially political leadership, is crucial. It could be
useful to develop the CAF, the Common Assessment Framework, not just
at the level of individual organizations, but also at the level of holdings,
territorial and functional. Finally, it will also be useful to develop strong
evaluations and audits at the level of these holdings. Leadership, quality
models, and evaluation and audit are all subject to development and
improvement, and could benefit from serious academic research.
There is a temptation to call this type ‘network governance’, even in the
private sector:
Examples of organizations with over a hundred boards show how network

governance provides: (a) division of powers; (b) checks and balances; (c) dis-
tributed intelligence; (d) decomposition in decision making labor; (e) cross
checking communication and control channels from stakeholder engagement;
(f) integration of management and governance to further self-regulation and
self-governance with: (g) operating advantage and sustainability. (Turnbull,
2012: 347)
But holdings are more than just networks, even if there are strong and
weak holdings.
Holding Governance Reform Programs
The content of a holding governance reform program consists of choos-

ing and implementing concrete mechanisms of HTM (e.g. input budgets,

top–down instructions and control lines), MTM (output budgets, tender-

ing, vouchers), and/or NTM (knowledge and personnel exchange, sharing
corporate identities, pooling resources) (Bouckaert et al., 2010: 52–4,
73–4). The interesting part of the reform question is finding the optimal
combination of HTM, MTM and NTM. There is a general impression
that HTM is still very effective, even if MTM could be used in specific
task contexts, while NTM remains attractive and appealing. Holding
governance reform programs are about ensuring governance readiness to
create capacities for single and clustered sets of public sector organizations
(Lodge and Wegrich, 2014: 152–67).
Measuring Holding Governance
Verhoest et al. (2012) have mapped the dynamics of numbers of agencies

that to an extent suggest fragmentation and centrifugal tendencies within
the national public sectors, followed by a reduction in those numbers, sug-
gesting a higher level of coherence. Bouckaert and Halligan (2008) have
mapped for some countries the intensities and dynamics of these numbers
and their degree of consolidation, and the (changing) range of mecha-
nisms used to govern this organizational population. Mapping coherence
and togetherness of holdings remains a difficult exercise in practice and
in theory. Solid holding governance is necessary but not sufficient. At
this stage, the individual organization and the holding remain within
the public sector. It is public service governance that is needed, and that
includes the private and the not-for-profit sectors.
PUBLIC SERVICE GOVERNANCE AND THE PUBLIC

SECTOR
Public sector delivery is part of public service delivery, which includes the
interaction with the not-for-profit and the private sector, and the citizens.
According to Pierre (1995: ix), ‘[w]e conceive public administration as the
key output linkage of the state towards civil society. However, the inter-
face between public administration and civil society is a two-way street,
including public policy implementation as well as policy demands from
private actors towards policy-makers.’
Public service governance refers to the premise that the public sector
delivery is part of the public service delivery. Most of the services delivered
will be effective only in collaboration with the private sector, the not-for-
profit sector, and the citizens. This implies that for public service delivery
the functioning of the public sector itself is necessary but not sufficient.

There is also a need to manage the interfaces with the private sector and
the third sector, and to make sure there is sufficient governance capacity
in the private and in the third sectors. The whole policy cycle, its design, its
implementation and its evaluation, happens in an open system of govern-
ment. Implementation will be more successful if stakeholders are involved
from the beginning. Because of ownership, there will be a higher chance
of civic behavior. If evaluations take stakeholders’ opinions into account,
there is a higher chance of a trusting population (OECD, 2011).
Obviously, in the implementation stage there is contracting out, partner-
ships, delegation to the private sector, to the third sector and to citizens.
Within the OECD, there is a general recommendation to use these part-
nerships with the private sector, the not-for-profit sector, with citizens,
and for central government with local government, to guarantee service
delivery in times of crisis and when dealing with public investment money.
Public service governance means that this two-way traffic of ideas and
involvement is well organized. This interface needs to be governed in a
transparent, legal and functional way, since it could also be a source of
corrupted interfaces. This means that the public sector needs to invest in
solid governance models in the private sector, in the third sector, and in
citizen initiatives, since this is part of public service governance (Pierre
and Peters, 2000; Bovaird and Löffler, 2009). One element of this public
service governance is clearly defining responsibilities and accountabilities
in situations of contracting out, partnerships and delegations. In addition,
mechanisms and rules of the game for these interfaces should be defined:
should it be more hierarchical, or more marketized, or more networked?
Weak or bad public service governance results in high risk of corruption,
or capture, or a situation where the cost is to the public sector and the
benefits to the stakeholder.
Public Service Reform Programs
Most projects in public sector reform programs are related to supporting,

regulating and ensuring that markets, non-profit or non-governmental
organizations, and citizen participation work properly. Investing in the
quality of private sector governance and third sector governance is essen-
tial for a solid public service delivery as delegated or contracted out by the
public sector. A second major cluster of projects is to guarantee capacity
within the public sector to create sustainable exchange of activities with
the private sector (market and not-for-profit). This implies capacity to
know the field and to create partnerships. There also needs to be a solid,
transparent and competent capacity to contract out, including monitoring,
inspecting and evaluating these partnerships and contracts. Public service

reform programs recognizing and pushing interdependence, positive-sum

solutions, multilateralism and collaboration are means to ensure public
service governance (Anheier, 2013: 149–59).
Measuring Public Service Governance
The significant literature on public service motivation and its measure-

ment through surveys gives a first idea of the importance of motivation
for governance (Perry, 2000; Perry and Hondeghem, 2008). According
to Vandenabeele (2007: 552), ‘this means that civil servants will only
demonstrate public service behavior to the extent that their organization
embraces public service values as a principle’.
Developing indicators is another approach to measuring public service
governance, also in a context of public sector governance or quality of
government. The OECD initiative ‘Government at a Glance’ includes
explicitly public services that are not provided (but budgeted and paid for)
by the public sector (OECD, 2013). Similar efforts to develop indicators
to measure, map and assess governance or quality of government indica-
tors are made within private foundations (e.g. Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2014)
or for example the University of Gothenburg (Quality of Government
Institute, 2010).
Solid public service governance is necessary but not sufficient. All
governance so far, corporate, holding or public service, is about organiza-
tional and institutional infrastructures with mechanisms, tools and instru-
ments. The drivers of governance are ideas, cultures and values. Therefore
there is a need for suprastructure governance.
SUPRASTRUCTURE GOVERNANCE IN THE PUBLIC

SECTOR
Suprastructure governance feeds the software of the machinery. According

to Clarke and Newman (1997: ix), ‘[w]e talk about the managerial
state because we want to locate managerialism as a cultural formation
and a distinctive set of ideologies and practices which form one of the
underpinnings of an emergent political settlement’.
Suprastructure governance refers to what is beyond institutional infra-
structure governance. It is essential that ideas, ideologies, values and
culture are equally part of the governance agenda. This implies a two-way
interaction between the hardware of organizations and institutions and
their software in terms of ideas, values and culture. This is not just, as
some argue (Rothberg, 2014), about a governance ‘logic of consequences’,

where inputs ultimately generate outputs and outcomes (Bouckaert and

Halligan, 2008), but also about a governance ‘logic of appropriateness’,
with key concepts for governance such as values, integrity, transparency
(Hood and Heald, 2006), ideas, and a culture of responsibility and account-
ability (Huberts et al., 2008). This may contribute to legitimacy (Dilulio,
2012). A governance ‘logic of inappropriateness’ would then be defined by
corruption, fraud, lack of transparency, a culture of irresponsibility and
absence of accountability.
There is a large literature about public value, but also about its opera-
tionalization. However, the first line should be about the value of the
public as such, in an open society. The agenda here is to increase public
value to legitimize the public sphere. Like justice, where the statement is
that justice should not only be done, but should be seen to be done, one
could say that public value should not only be generated, but should
be seen to be generated. This has to do with perception, but also with
expectations that lead to satisfaction and ultimately to trust.
Change will happen if elites think that reforms will be desirable and
feasible. It helps if change is necessary and impossible to escape, like a
burning platform. But it also requires a private sector, a not-for-profit
sector and citizens to make this change happen. This raises the problem
of causality. Do we first change the infrastructure, that is, the institutions
and organizations, the legislation, and then the practices will effectively
change since the ideas, the values and the culture will have changed? Or do
we first change the values, the ideas, the culture, and then it will be easier
to change practices and institutions and legislation? Obviously, both cau-
salities are needed. And in many cases there is also a need to replace people
and to have sufficient time to change and reform.
Culture is also a crucial term, such as in cultures of openness and
transparency, of fairness, of justice, of absence of corruption. Even in
the private sector it is recognized and accepted that ‘national culture is
an essential for the design of corporate governance systems’ (Breuer and
Salzmann, 2012: 394). This is even more the case for the public sector.
In the literature, several schools discuss culture and also measure it. The
crucial point of this literature is to make the connection with management,
administration and governance (Schedler and Pröller, 2007).
Suprastructure Reform Programs
Much research demonstrates the importance of leadership to boost supra-

structure governance. Developing leadership programs therefore becomes
a crucial type of project in suprastructure reform programs (Kaptein
et al., 2005). Even if it is accepted that cultural change takes a long time

and is difficult, and given that removing people is not always possible or
easy, training and education becomes a valid type of project to change
governance logics of appropriateness in society at large. It would be useful
for each reform project to have an ex ante evaluation of what impact the
project will have on infrastructure and suprastructure. Projects could
be infrastructure oriented (like making legislation or creating an anti-
corruption organization), they could be suprastructure oriented (training),
or they could be both.
Measuring Suprastructure Governance
The measurement of suprastructure governance includes two major types

of perception measurement. There is measurement of ‘corruption’ and of
‘transparency’. These international and diachronic measures are devel-
oped by international NGOs. Even if there is significant criticism of the
methodological basis, there is a general understanding and intuition of
the indicators, and the suggested levels of corruption and transparency.
Suprastructure governance is necessary but not sufficient. Ultimately,
there is a macro-governance level, at the level of the state, where the major
societal mechanisms should come together. There is a need for systemic
governance.
SYSTEMIC GOVERNANCE IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
Systemic governance is at the level of the state itself and encompasses

micro-and mesogovernances. According to König (1996: 4; 59),
[p]ublic administration may be interpreted as a social system existing and func-

tioning in accordance with its own order but, on the other hand, it also depends
on environmental conditions in a complex and changing society . . . In the light
of the modern society’s functional differentiation, state and market are notable
for their own characteristic strategies to control the supply of goods. The type,
scope, and distribution of private goods are decided on by harmonizing the
individual preferences within the market mechanism; decisions on the produc-
tion of public goods, on the other hand result from a collective, i.e. politico-
administrative, development of objectives.
Systemic governance refers to the system design at the state level. A basic
framing document for this macro-systemic governance is the Constitution
as guardian of the state of law, referring to common law or to public and
administrative law. This also includes the ‘checks and balances’ in the
system.

A first key element is the proportion of the division of GDP for the
market, for the public and for not-for-profits; this immediately implies
the weight of the different allocation mechanisms of price, budget and
negotiated transfers. A second element is the degree of centralization and
decentralization, with strong cities, or federalism with strong regions, as
an expression of autonomy (Conteh, 2013; Ongaro et al., 2011). A third
element is how societal, political and administrative elites are connected,
related and shaped. Another element is the way participation is organized
(Hoffmann-Martinot, 2013), including choice of voting system, where
some countries have moved to more proportional systems. These are some
key components of a systemic macrogovernance. Vincent Ostrom (2014:
238) describes the two tendencies of, on the one hand, ‘the manifestation
of a “natural” tendency in any system of government to move to a single
center of ultimate authority that would exercise a position of absolute
supremacy in the governance of society’, and, on the other, ‘the equilibrat-
ing tendencies of a federal system of governance constituted on principles
of opposite and rival interests where power is used to check power’ (ibid.).
It is clear, as Figure 2.2 demonstrates, that the so-called third sector and
Private sector Public sector
Supranational
(incl. EU)
Private
companies
National
(nation state)
NGOs, citizen
organizations, citizens
sub-national
(e.g. regional, local)
Figure 2.2 Systemic governance

a related resource allocation and governance mechanism are crucial and

indispensable in the governance of states. According to Elinor Ostrom
(2014: 167), ‘[c]ontemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institu-
tional arrangements for governing common-pool resources (CPRs) and
public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while
developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichoto-
mous world of “the market” and “the state”’.
Figure 2.2 shows the dynamics and the complexity of systemic
governance at the state level. It includes the private sector with the
market- based organization and the not- for-
profit, non-governmental
organizations. It obviously includes the entire public sector. But it
also includes the interactions, interfaces and shifts between all these
components, changing their importance. Shifts between these boxes
sometimes just happen (‘It’s the economy, stupid’), sometimes they need
to happen (as in saving the banks that were too big to fail), or some-
times it is actively organized (privatization; decentralization within the
public sector). This all adds to the complexity of regimes in governance
(Moynihan et al., 2011).
Whole-of-government (WG) is one version of a consolidated, joined-up,
or integrated vision of systemic governance. According to Christensen and
Lægreid (2007: 1060),
[t]he scope of WG is pretty broad. One can distinguish between WG policy

making and WG implementation, between horizontal linkages and vertical
linkages . . . WG activities may span any or all levels of government and involve
groups outside government. It is about joining up at the top, but also about
joining up at the base, enhancing local level integration, and involving public–
private partnerships.
Systemic Governance Reform Programs
Projects covering a systemic governance reform program include rewriting

the constitution and legislation to decentralize generally, to actively decen-
tralize resources (HR and budgets), to regulate political party financing, to
approve institutions and legislation promoting an open society (ombuds-
man, audit, open data etc.), to define and change election types (propor-
tional, majoritarian), to develop NGO legislation and so on. This results
in system transformation such as in Central and Eastern Europe after the
fall of the Berlin Wall (Bouckaert et al., 2009). Changing the nature of a
system to become more marketized, or participatory, or decentralized,
or transparent and so on requires a long-term, coherent and sustainable
vision of a whole societal elite.

Measuring Systemic Governance
Measuring progress or change in systemic governance requires long-term

data sets on key issues such as participation, decentralization, marketi-
zation, transparency and the like. This is not straightforward, but these
data and indicators are necessary to assess long-term transformations and
transitions.
To this systemic governance debate, three additional agendas have been
added: first, what about governance without democracy?; second, what
about governance without government?; the third is that of governance
and countries’ degrees of development.
GOVERNANCE WITHOUT DEMOCRACY?
According to Fukuyama (2013: 4), governance is ‘a government’s ability

to make and enforce rules, and to deliver services, regardless of whether
that government is democratic or not’. From this controversial point of
view, ‘governance is about the performance of agents in carrying out the
wishes of principals, and not about the goals that principals set’ (ibid.). In
this context Fukuyama refers to Weber’s bureaucracy as an ideal type. In
a reaction, Kishore Mahbubani points out that what Fukuyama actually
says is that ‘democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition
for good governance’ (29 March 2013, comments on the Governance
website). And he continues, ‘yes, it is possible to have good governance
without democracy’. According to the five levels that have been devel-
oped above, a technocratic vision of governance is possible, and it, too, is
necessary but certainly insufficient.
The five levels need to be taken into account to be able to talk in a
sustainable way about governance. In the EU institutional context, it is
certainly true that improving governance and upgrading the democratic
level of the EU are seen as a pair, especially in periods of crisis (Habermas,
2013). But in developing countries also, this connection is valid. According
to Huque and Zafarullah (2014: 19),
[a]n inclusive state will have much better prospects of success in making reforms
effective . . . it guides our thinking toward the establishment of an open and
transparent political system that allows various groups in society to contribute
to governance. This will facilitate free and open communication, resulting in
citizen input in political and administrative decisions. The inclusive state will
thus have a participatory and democratic environment that has the potential to
overcome the restrictions found in exclusive states.

Democracy is not just about electing representatives every four or five

years. It is about participation, transparency, open society, due process
in decision making, responsibility and accountability, legitimacy and
trusting systems. Most of these key words are related or are present in the
definition of the concept of governance.
GOVERNANCE WITHOUT GOVERNMENT?
The second debate, which arose in the Belgian case when there was no
federal government for 590 days (until 6 December 2011), about one and
a half years, raised the question ‘Governance without government?’ Five
lessons could be derived from this situation (Bouckaert and Brans, 2012).
First, caretaker conventions and routines guarantee the continuity of
government operations; second, when the terms of contracts of top civil
servants exceed the term of government, this contributes to stability and
continuity; third, in mature democracies, a power vacuum is taken care
of in a constructive, creative and responsible way; fourth, the multilevel
governance of regions, caretaker government and the EU is robust; fifth,
there is no ‘normal’ length of time in taking crucial political decisions.
The issue was already raised by Peters and Pierre (1998). On the one
hand it is possible to define governance without government in a positive
sense as governance consisting of networks, partnerships and markets,
including international markets. In this sense, governments are not able
to govern globalized and international markets, especially if they are
disconnected from the private market. There could also be a negative defi-
nition, where ‘hollow’ states emerge. In these cases, markets and society
fill the vacuum, and perhaps also local communities and/or criminal
organizations.
GOVERNANCE AND DEGREES OF DEVELOPMENT
In general, it is unwise to blindly copy-paste the solutions of others. This is

particularly true for developing countries looking at developed countries,
since solutions do not travel well (Schick, 1998). Nevertheless, governance
for development and excellence in public service do happen in practice
(G4D, 2014).
According to Conteh and Huque (2014: 5), ‘[d]eveloping countries were
both obliged and compelled to adjust to the trend that began in the devel-
oped world’. The trends within the public sector are participation, flex-
ibility, deregulation, performance focus, decentralization, responsibility/

accountability for results and contracting. Trends outside the public sector
are privatization and the generalized use of market-type mechanisms and
partnerships with the private sector.
A crucial element of governing a developing country’s state will be its
inclusiveness:
An inclusive state will have a much better prospect of success in making reforms
effective . . . In most developing countries, the state is authoritarian and
exclusive . . . the success of public management reforms in developing countries
is closely related to the transformation of the nature of the state. (Huque and
Zafarullah, 2014: 19–20)
Conteh emphasizes explicitly two elements in his appraisal of new public

governance in Africa. State building and systemic governance are both
essential, especially for developing countries: ‘effectiveness of public man-
agement and service delivery in the context of fragile post-conflict states
is fundamentally about restoring the legitimacy of the state as the appro-
priate conduit for pursuing society’s collective development aspirations’
(Conteh, 2014: 32). The second condition is a systemic approach:
‘Systems thinking’ focuses on developing a shared vision of governance

between public agencies. A systems approach to public management serves a
tension management, both as a concept and a practice, is nested within the
institutions of the state, and serves as the main vehicle for accomplishing public
policy goals. (Ibid.)
CONCLUSION
We have looked at the five types within the broadest span of govern-
ance resulting in related reform programs. Depending on the priorities
of a country, these priorities change. Ultimately all five types need to be
governed. A society cannot afford to have weak links within this span of
governance. This governance debate becomes more complex when issues
of public and private, and key concepts such as democracy, government
and development, are added.
REFERENCES
Allison, Graham T. (2012) ‘Public and private management: are they fundamentally alike
in all unimportant respects?’, in G.M. Shafritz and A.C. Hyde (eds), Classics in Public
Administration. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, pp. 395–411.

Andrews, Matt (2010) ‘Good government means different things in different countries’,
Governance, 23(1), 7–35.
Anheier, Helmut K. (2013) ‘Recommendations and conclusions’ in Hertie School of
Governance, The Governance Report 2013, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 149–61.
Bebchuk, Lucian A. and Weisbach, Michael S. (2012) ‘The state of corporate govern-
ance research’, in Sabri Boubaker, Bang Dang Nguyen and Duc Khuong Nguyen (eds),
Corporate Governance: Recent Developments and New Trends, Berlin and Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag, pp. 325–46.
Bertelsmann Stiftung (2014) Policy Performance and Governance Capacities in the OECD and
EU: Sustainable Governance Indicators, Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Boubaker, Sabri, Nguyen, Bang Dang and Nguyen, Duc Khuong (eds) (2012) Corporate
Governance: Recent Developments and New Trends, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer
Verlag.
Bouckaert, Geert and Brans, Marleen (2012) ‘Commentary: governing without government:
lessons from Belgium’s caretaker government’, Governance, 25(2), 173–6.
Bouckaert, Geert and Halligan, John (2008) Managing Performance, International
Comparisons, London: Routledge.
Bouckaert, Geert, Nemec, Juraj, Nakrosis, Vitalis, Hajnal, Gyorgy and Tonnisson, Kristiina
(eds) (2009) Public Management Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, Bratislava:
NISPAcee Press.
Bouckaert, Geert, Peters, B. Guy and Verhoest, Koen (2010) The Coordination of Public
Sector Organizations: Shifting Patterns of Public Management, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bovaird, Tony and Löffler, Elke (eds) (2009) Public Management and Governance, 2nd edn,
London: Routledge.
Boyne, George A. (2002) ‘Public and private management: what’s the difference?’, Journal of
Management Studies, 39(1), 97–122.
Breuer, Wolfgang and Salzmann, Astrid Juliane (2012) ‘National culture and corporate
governance’, in Sabri Boubaker, Bang Dang Nguyen and Duc Khuong Nguyen (eds),
Corporate Governance: Recent Developments and New Trends, Berlin and Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag, pp. 369–97.
Cagniano, Marco (ed.) (2013) Public Financial Management and Its Emerging Architecture,
Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.
Christensen, Tom and Laegreid, Per (2007) ‘The whole-of-government approach to public
sector reform’, Public Administration Review, November/December, 1059–66.
Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial State, London: Sage.
Conteh, Charles (2013) Policy Governance in Multi-level Systems: Economic Development
& Policy Implementation in Canada, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Conteh, Charles (2014) ‘An appraisal of the new public governance as a paradigm of public
sector reform in Africa’, in Charles Conteh and Ahmed Shafiqul Huque (eds), Public Sector
Reforms in Developing Countries: Paradoxes and Practices, London: Routledge, pp. 23–35.
Conteh, Charles and Huque, Ahmed Shafiqul (2014) ‘Paradoxes in public management
reform in developing countries: introduction’, in Charles Conte and Ahmed Shafiqul
Huque (eds), Public Sector Reforms in Developing Countries: Paradoxes and Practices,
London: Routledge, pp. 3–9.
Dilulio, John J. Jr (2012) ‘James Q. Wilson: “The Legitimacy of Government Itself”’, Public
Administration Review, 72(4), 485–6.
Drechsler, Wolfgang (2001) ‘The contrade, the palio, and the ben comune: lessons from
Siena’, TRAMES, 10(2), 99–125, at www.ceeol.com.
Fukuyama, Francis (2013) ‘What is governance?’, Governance, 26(3), 347–68.
G4D (2014) Governance for Development: Towards Excellence in Global Public Service.
Cambridge: Nexus Strategic Partnerships Ltd.
Habermas, Jürgen (2013) ‘Democracy, solidarity and the European crisis’, Lecture delivered
at the K.U. Leuven, 26 April 2013.

Hoffmann-Martinot, Vincent (2013) ‘Challenges of contemporary governance’, Participation,

37(1), 2.
Hood, Christopher and Heald, David (eds) (2006) Transparency: The Key to Better
Governance, Proceedings of the British Academy 135, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huberts, W.J.C., Maesschalck, Jeroen and Jurkiewicz, Carole L. (eds) (2008) Ethics and
Integrity of Governance: Perspectives Across Frontiers, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton,
MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Huque, Ahmed Shafiqul and Zafarullah, Habib (2014) ‘Public management reform in devel-
oping countries: contradictions and the inclusive state’, in Charles Conteh and Ahmed
Shafiqul Huque (eds), Public Sector Reforms in Developing Countries: Paradoxes and
Practices, London: Routledge, pp. 10–22.
Kaptein, Muel, Huberts, Leo and Avelino, Scott (2005) ‘Demonstrating ethical leadership by
measuring ethics: a survey of U.S. public servants’, Public Integrity, 7(4), 299–311.
König, K. (1996) ‘On the critique of New Public Management’, Speyer, 155, Speyer
Forschungsberichte.
Lodge, Martin, and Wegrich, Kai (2014) ‘Enhancing administrative capacities for better
governance: seven recommendations’, in Hertie School of Governance, The Governance
Report 2014, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–70.
Lynn, Laurence E. Jr, Heinrich, Carolyn and Hill, Carolyn J. (2001) Improving Governance:
A New Logic for Empirical Research, Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Mahbubani, Kishore (2013) ‘Comment on Fukuyama’, Governance, 29 March; also pub-
lished in Singapore Straits Times.
Metcalfe, L. and Richards, S. (1987) ‘Evolving public management cultures’ in J. Kooiman
and K.A. Eliassen (eds), Managing Public Organizations: Lessons from Contemporary
European Experience, London: Sage.
Moynihan, Donald P., Sergio, Fernandez, Soonhee, Kim, Kelly, M. LeRoux, Suzanne,
Piotrowski, J., Wright, Bradley E. and Yang, Kaifeng (2011) ‘Performance regimes amidst
governance complexity’, Special Issue. J-PART, 21(1), 141–55.
OECD (2011) The Call for Innovative and Open Government, Paris: OECD.
OECD (2013) Government at a Glance 2013, Paris: OECD.
Ongaro, Edoardo (2014) ‘The relationship between the new European governance emerg-
ing from the fiscal crisis and administrative reforms: qualitative different, quantitative
different, or nothing new? A plea for a research agenda’, Administrative Culture, 15(1),
10–20.
Ongaro, Edoardo, Massey, Andrew, Holzer, Marc and Wayenberg, Ellen (eds) (2011)
Policy, Performance and Management in Governance and Intergovernmental Relations:
Transatlantic Perspectives, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Ostrom, Elinor (2014) ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex
economic systems’, in Filippo Sabetti and Paul Dragos Aligica (eds), Choice, Rules and
Collective Action: The Ostroms on the Study of Institutions and Governance, Colchester:
ECPR Press, pp. 167–209.
Ostrom, Vincent (2014) ‘A conceptual–computational logic for federal systems of govern-
ance’, in Filippo Sabetti and Paul Dragos Aligica (eds), Choice, Rules and Collective
Action: The Ostroms on the Study of Institutions and Governance, Colchester: ECPR Press,
pp. 227–41.
Perry, James L. (2000) ‘Bringing society in: toward a theory of public-service motivation’,
J-PART, 10(2), 471–88.
Perry, James L. and Hondeghem, Annie (eds) (2008) Motivation in Public Management: The
Call of Public Service, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perry, J. and Kraemer, K. (eds) (1983) Public Management: Public and Private Perspectives,
Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield.
Peters, B. Guy and Pierre, John (1998) ‘Governance without government? Rethinking public
administration’, J-PART, 8(2), 223–43.

Pierre, J. (ed.) (1995) Bureaucracy in the Modern State: An Introduction to Comparative

Public Administration, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, US: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Pierre, J. and Peters, G. (2000) Governance, Politics and the State, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Ploom, Illimar (2014) ‘Towards neoliberal imperialism? Discussing implications of the new
European governance emerging from the fiscal crisis and administrative reforms for the
identity of the EU’, Administrative Culture, 15(1), 21–38.
Pollitt, Christopher (ed.) (2013) Context in Public Policy and Management: The Missing
Link?, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Pollitt, Christopher and Bouckaert, Geert (2011) Public Management Reform: A Comparative
Analysis – NPM, Governance and the Neo-Weberian State, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Pollitt, Christopher and Hupe, Peter (2011) ‘Talking about government: the role of magic
concepts’, Public Management Review, 13(5), 641–58.
Quality of Government Institute (2010) Measuring the Quality of Government and Subnational
Variation. Report for the European Commission, Stockholm: University of Gothenburg,
Sweden.
Rothberg, Robert I. (2014) ‘Good governance means performance and results’, Governance,
27(3), 511–18.
Schedler, Kuno and Pröller, Isabella (eds) (2007) Cultural Aspects of Public Management
Reforms, Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Schick, Allen (1998) ‘Why most developing countries should not try New Zealand reforms’,
The World Bank Research Observer, 13(1), 123–31.
Shleifer, Andrei and Vishny, Robert W. (1996) ‘A survey of corporate governance’, NBER
Working Paper Series, Working Paper 5554, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of
Economic Research.
Turnbull, Shann (2012) ‘A sustainable future for corporate governance: theory and prac-
tice’, in Sabri Boubaker, Bang Dang Nguyen and Duc Khuong Nguyen (eds), Corporate
Governance: Recent Developments and New Trends, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer
Verlag, pp. 347–68.
Vandenabeele, Wouter (2007) ‘Toward a public administration theory of public service moti-
vation’, Public Management Review, 9(4), 545–56.
Verhoest, Koen, Van Thiel, Sandra, Bouckaert, Geert and Laegreid, Per (eds) (2012)
Government Agencies: Practices and Lessons from 30 Countries, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

3. Governance: if governance is everything,
maybe it’s nothing1
Perri 6
For almost a generation, debates in public administration, policy studies,

international relations and development studies have centred upon claims
about a supposed rise of ‘governance’. Definitions of the term vary. Nor
do researchers agree about what is supposed to have changed, when or
what caused the change. But there are common themes. Chhotray and
Stoker (2009: 3) define governance as ‘rules of collective decision-making
. . . where there is a plurality of actors or organisations and where no
formal control system can dictate the terms of the relationship between
these actors and organisations’. Bevir (2011: 2) characterizes governance
as ‘complex processes and interactions that constitute patterns of rule . . .
phenomena that are hybrid and multijurisdictional with plural stakehold-
ers’. Bevir and Rhodes (2003: 55) list resource interdependence, trust,
reciprocity and diplomacy as defining features of governance. Similarly,
van Kersbergen and van Waarden (2004: 151–2) claim that all the usages
they review across disciplines share an understanding of governance as
‘pluricentric’, based on ‘networks’ among relatively autonomous but
interdependent actors, with an emphasis on process of negotiation and
accommodation rather than formal structure, in order to find ways
to reduce uncertainty and thereby strengthen reasons for cooperation.
Rosenau (1992) defined governance as
activities backed by shared goals that may or may not derive from legal and
formally prescribed responsibilities and that do not necessarily rely on police
powers to overcome defiance and attain compliance . . . subsum[ing] informal
non- governmental mechanisms . . . dependent on inter- subjective meanings
. . . that work . . . only if [they are] accepted by . . . the most powerful of those
[they] affect.
Peters and Pierre (2000) allowed governance to encompass coordination

by any of the now conventional trichotomy of markets, hierarchies and
networks (Thompson et al., 1991) and for good measure added a fourth
category of ‘communities’. They even insisted on the continuing central-
ity of public authorities in all forms of governance. By contrast, Bevir
and van Kersbergen and van Waarden insist that only ‘networks’ and not
56

If governance is everything, maybe it’s nothing 57
hierarchical forms constitute governance, in which state bodies have no

privilege. Kooiman’s (2003) theoretical treatment similarly emphasized
diversity in ‘interactive’ structures among many actors and organizations,
but did allow public authorities some weaker instruments for persuasive
and indirect influence under the rubric of ‘metagovernance’.
By comparison with the state of the public administration literature in
the 1970s, debates about ‘governance’ have raised the quality of analysis
and explanation. They have fostered closer attention to governments’
relations with, and even dependence on, other agencies domestically
and internationally in the making of policy, to its implementation and
coordination, to sustaining legitimacy with individual clients and the
wider citizenry and with powerful interests, and even to the elementary
processes of gathering information. Claims about the efficacy of consti-
tutional presumptions have been subjected to more extensive empirical
analysis than was the case in the writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Debates
about governance helped to make the study of public management more
outward- looking and better integrated with organizational sociology.
Those debates led public management scholars to pay more attention to
theoretical micro-foundations. This prompted creative work on types of
institutions, relations among them, on ways in which policy instruments
shape relations between agencies and on their capabilities and limitations,
and is in turn shaped by institutional and technological change.
Yet, this chapter argues, many of these theories of governance now
seem overstated at best. As is the fate of most fashionable social science
concepts, ‘governance’ has suffered increasingly from concept stretching
(Sartori, 1970). The claim no longer seems so convincing that there has
been a grand historical discontinuity in recent decades. The typologies of
institutional forms used by most governance theorists now seem theoreti-
cally weak, and they provide a poor basis for normative analysis of insti-
tutional design. The chapter makes each of these critiques in turn, before
concluding that more nuanced and sophisticated micro- foundational
frameworks will be required than those that underpinned the mainstream
theories of governance.
WHAT IS NOT GOVERNANCE?
If claims about the rise, prevalence or centrality of governance are to have

any purchase, they must be falsifiable. Therefore we need to know what
might be excluded by these definitions, and what arrangements we should
expect to find in decline, either in the attempt or in their effectiveness.
Chhotray and Stoker (2009: 4) suggest that the opposite of governance

is ‘monocratic government – governing by one person’. If that is all that

is excluded, then it is difficult to find empirical cases. Certainly, histori-
cal dictatorships usually rested on complicated mutual dependency and
accommodation within ruling elites and beyond. Simple fiat and credible
threat of force were never the principal means by which twentieth-century
dictators or seventeenth-century absolute monarchs achieved such influ-
ence as they did over their bureaucratic or military apparatus. Persuasion,
incentives and the building of shared identities, beliefs or norms are always
necessary to motivate supporters among those asked to exercise domina-
tion and to secure sufficient acquiescence and supply of information from
those over whom power is exercised for the system to maintain itself at fea-
sible cost. Perhaps governance theorists would regard their conception of
monocratic rule as an ideal type, never actually realized. If so, then these
theories’ capacity to distinguish trends towards ‘more’ governance become
markedly weaker, for they must thereby concede that there is governance
everywhere, and that most of political and administrative history consists
in variations on governance.
Although Peters and Pierre (2000) and even Kooiman (2003) allow
‘hierarchy’ as one form of governance, many governance theorists suggest
that hierarchy is inimical to governance as they understand it. Bevir and
Rhodes (2003: 55–6) specifically insist that ‘governance as networks’ is to
be contrasted with hierarchy. They define hierarchy as authority, rules,
commands and subordination, and a system in which the direct employ-
ment relationship is the basis of organization. Again, though, most organ-
izational settings either conventionally described or properly understood
as hierarchical both lack one or more of these features, but may be charac-
terized as hierarchical on the basis of features not mentioned in Bevir and
Rhodes’s list. However, as we shall demonstrate in a later section, this is
a theoretical misunderstanding of hierarchy that mis-describes the cases
commonly used to anchor the concept. Some hierarchical systems have
no single centre of authority. Many hierarchies make little use of prior
command and detailed control. Hierarchical ordering is often sustained
with neither direct employment nor vertically integrated formal organiza-
tion; indeed, it often works through systems of negotiated contracts.
Rhodes’s (1997) early accounts of ‘governance’ claimed that states now
exhibited a ‘hollow centre’, so suggesting that a key opposite form from
governance would be centralization. His critics replied that, even under
Thatcher, to whose period in power Rhodes had originally traced the
rise to dominance of ‘governance’, and to a greater degree under Blair,
there were major investments in central capacities for oversight over and
intrusion into departmental and local decision-making, by no means all of
which were merely ineffective, straightforwardly frustrated or else empty

symbolic shams (Marsh et al., 2003). If centralization suggests a unitary

state and if ‘governance’ is anything else, then the UK was always subject
only to governance, never having been a unitary state but a structure of
three mainland jurisdictions, several others for the Channel Islands, the
Isle of Man and assorted self-governing overseas territories, to say nothing
of the sequence of structures used in Northern Ireland since 1922.
For Rhodes (e.g. 2011; Bevir and Rhodes, 2010: 164), a key opposite
case for ‘governance’ is ‘the Westminster model’. That term of art is gener-
ally understood to mean principles of the sovereignty of the elected house,
the power of ministers who are themselves accountable to Parliament to
require a politically neutral civil service to carry out lawful instructions
after hearing advice. As an empirical account of how the British, let alone
Canadian or Australian or any other government worked, the ‘model’
would be entirely inadequate for any period since 1688. It functions, if
it functions at all, as a guiding and legitimating myth rather than as a
description. Yet self- organizing, horizontal networks without author-
ity are not the only alternative to such a ‘model’. Today, Rhodes (2011)
freely concedes the first point. Moreover, his anti-foundationalist shift to
documenting contrasting ‘narratives’ (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; Rhodes,
2011) has forced him to concede that his own conception of governance,
too, has only the same status of being a legitimating myth. This move
drastically weakens the claims originally made for governance and indeed
it undermines the interest of governance as a substantive theory.
In international relations, the opposites of governance are typically
claimed either to be ‘the Westphalian system’ of monadic nation states
in zero-sum competition or else ‘inter-governmentalism’ in which nation
states cooperate without conceding powers to supranational bodies or to
any cross-national concertation among subnational ones. A weakness of
the same type arises here. As critics such as Osiander (2001) have shown,
even the supposed high point of monadic nation states in zero-sum com-
petition in the seventeenth century following the Treaty of Westphalia
was no such thing. Extensive cooperation and coordination through trade
arrangements, joint dynastic strategy and occasional grand treaty-making
among states were necessary to sustain the commitment to state sovereignty
in religious matters (see also Krasner, 1995; Teschke, 2003). In mediaeval
times, a much more fragmented order operated that encompassed supra-
national tiers of authority in papal and imperial structures and greatly
fragmented authority within kingdoms and republics (Caporaso, 2000).
Osiander shows that the period of nearly genuinely general sovereignty
for nation states in Europe arose much later, in the nineteenth century,
and was transitory and atypical precisely because it was not sustainable.
‘Westphalia’ serves as a legitimating myth, although the treaty of 1648

both attempted and achieved much less than the subsequent ideal type of
national sovereignty implies. Moreover, even twentieth-century interna-
tional relations were marked not by anarchy but by hierarchical ordering
(in both the strict and loose senses) based on authority rather than simple
force, both within alliances and in international structures (Lake, 2009).
Each of the proposed opposite forms for governance turns out not to be
empirically realized. At most, each is an ideal type. Empirical cases of sup-
posed opposites turn out to exhibit many features claimed for governance.
Reliance on ideal-typical contrast might not be catastrophic for falsifiabil-
ity, if we had clear means of scaling cases as showing more or less govern-
ance or some opposite form (Page, 2008). But it is clear that this cannot be
done, because each opposite ideal type turns out, for reasons that become
clear in examination of empirical cases, to be unsustainable unless some
of the features claimed for governance are granted to it. Therefore the
contrast between governance and its opposites is not a comparison of
similarly specified concepts – a condition that clearly indicates concept
stretching.
THERE HAS BEEN NO GRAND, RECENT

HISTORICAL DISCONTINUITY
Public administration theories of governance typically claim that there

has been a recent grand historical transition towards governance, from
whatever converse condition they particularly emphasize. For example,
although his subsequent work (e.g. 2011) has retreated from this view,
Rhodes (1997a) summarized his claims, made in a series of studies, that in
the 1980s there was a major shift in Britain away from hierarchy towards
networks and fragmentation arising from contracting out of public ser-
vices and lobby mobilization within central government. In similar vein,
Sørensen and Torfing (2005) repeatedly emphasized the ‘new and distinc-
tive’ configuration that they detect in ‘network governance’. They were
less interested than Rhodes in purchase- of-
service arrangements, and
more concerned with consultation and negotiation with and participation
by private and voluntary organizations in decision-making. Although its
constituent chapters did not bear out this part of its argument, the premise
of Salamon’s (2002) volume was that ‘the new governance’ consisted in a
recent once-for-all shift from reliance on direct government provision to
the use of other policy instruments ranging from tax incentives through
purchase-of-service contracting to vouchers by way of regulation. This
section shows that these claims are unsustainable.
Reviewing historical studies of policy- making in British central

g overnment since the 1980s – the period that Rhodes regarded as marked
by declining central capability and growing influence of autonomous net-
works – Bellamy (2011) shows that, on the contrary, there was a continu-
ous process over a much longer period of reconfiguration from informal
to more formal hierarchy: attempts to ‘fill in’ were more consequential
than processes of ‘hollowing out’. Within central governments, central
oversight capacity over spending departments has been strengthened in
a great many countries in the past two decades (Dahlström et al, 2011;
Holliday, 2000). Rhodes argues that these central agencies have disap-
pointed the hopes invested in them. Certainly, there have been unintended
consequences of tight central performance management (Peck and 6, 2006;
Bevan and Hood, 2006). But all forms of social organization risk futility,
jeopardy or perversity (Hirschman, 1991): no one has shown that central
oversight is more vulnerable to them than is (for example) consensual
negotiation, or vice versa (6, 2014b).
Moreover, hierarchy in its proper sense has not declined in central
government departments, below the core executive. For example, Page
and Jenkins’s (2005) detailed study of middle-ranking civil servants’ roles
in rule-making and developing policy detail within broad parameters set
by ministers shows that hierarchical ordering remains secure in British
government. Page’s (2012) subsequent cross-national comparative pro-
gramme reinforced the finding. Scholars emphasizing roles for private
sector agencies in rule-making now acknowledge that much of that work is
done in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ – meaning that agencies act under state
licence, with state enablement, or under threat of ‘last resort’ action by
states (Héritier and Lehmkuhl, 2008).
The governance theorists’ implied claim that before the 1980s governing
was typically organized around tight, command-based and explicit rule-
based central authority is as poorly founded as their claims of a drastic
shift since then. Indeed, the reverse is closer to the truth. In the 1950s
and 1960s in Britain’s nationalized health care system, often supposed
to have been the apogee of authority, and in the central–local relations
that ordered primary and secondary schooling, central influence was
often indirect. It was exercised through guidance and funding approvals
rather than by commands, reliant on few performance controls of any
quantitative kind. Inspectorates were typically bodies exercising profes-
sional rather than managerial judgement, and exercised largely consen-
sual regulation. Governance theorists ought to recognize this pattern as
showing much of the self-organizing, partly horizontal, negotiated order
that they claim to be absent in this period and supposedly only ascend-
ant from the 1980s. Yet examination of central government confirms the
pattern observed in health and education. British governments from 1945

through to the end of the 1970s had to engage in frequent negotiations

with trades unions, which limited their authority to exercise direct control
over policy, industries and public service configuration in sharp contrast
with their successors. Pemberton (2004) demonstrates that cliques, claques
and clusters of individuals and interest groups typically defined by govern-
ance theorists as ‘networks’ exercised huge influence within the machinery
of the core executive and with spending departments, and not only in
externally convened ‘iron triangles’, during the 1960s, in precisely the way
that governance theorists have wanted to claim as a novelty of post-1980s
governing. As far as self-organizing groups are concerned, the Treasury’s
1960s Economic Policy group enjoyed professional autonomy greater
than any Treasury team would have now (Cairncross, 1997).
The same critique can be made of services and operations, over both the
long and recent history of governing, as Bellamy makes for policy-making.
For most of the history of government, states have purchased both inputs
and services for citizens from external bodies. A canonical study of the
Roman republic showed that external procurement from contractors was
the principal policy instrument of that sophisticated state (Badian, 1972).
Core functions of European absolutist states, including the collection of
taxes, were ‘farmed’ by private contractors. Defence procurement of uni-
forms, small arms and battleships has been by contract with private sup-
pliers ever since standing armies and navies replaced militias and feudal
levies that had to supply their own matériel. Indeed, by comparison with
the period between 1916 and 1919, when Britain’s Ministry of Munitions
represented the fastest growth in public expenditure on purchase of goods
and services in modern times (Adams, 1978), any recent shifts seem very
modest. Regulation goes back to the first controls of weights and measures
in ancient Sumer. Independent arm’s-length regulatory bodies were estab-
lished for occupational health and safety and then for railways in many
countries in the nineteenth century. There has been innovation in all these
policy instruments, but that process has been continuous throughout the
history of governing. True, government insurance for priority services was
hardly used until the early twentieth century, but this only extended export
guarantee schemes used by early modern mercantilist states. Vouchers
for public services in their present form were not widely used until the
twentieth century. Yet even these only extend the individualized hypoth-
ecated financial support that Lloyd George introduced in 1911 for health
insurance (Grigg, 1978). Just when tax reliefs were first used to stimu-
late priority services depends on definition. Yet they were already well
established when Gladstone made them a central tool of micro-economic
management by introducing them for life insurance (Zimmeck, 1985). On
the measure of concertation between voluntary bodies and government in

welfare, Dutch ‘pillarization’ developed from roots in sixteenth-century

denominational organization into a system in concertation with state
guidance, persuasion and consultation after 1918 (e.g. van Kersbergen and
Becker, 1988).
Those who claim that something new has occurred recently sometimes
suggest that the proportion of governing activity on which these tools are
used is greater than before, say, the 1980s. The claim does not withstand
much scrutiny. Today, the biggest single item of public expenditure in
most European states is that for old age pensions. In many countries pen-
sions are still administered by directly employed agencies (save in coun-
tries where pensions were always administered by social insurance funds
anyway). Contracting- out and public–private partnerships are limited
in pension administration to inputs such as information technology and
construction for buildings. Most countries eliminated tax farming for
many taxes by the nineteenth century in favour of directly administered
collection; this method still dominates. Self-assessment, compliance and
the dance between avoidance and evasion is as much a matter of negoti-
ated relations with companies and their tax advisers over tax liabilities and
just as delicate as it ever was. Indeed, recent concerted inter-governmental
pressure on tax havens has arguably strengthened the power of states to
exercise some degree of tighter rule-based control, after many decades of
what many ministers regard as too little government and too much gov-
ernance. Conversely, Jordan et al. (2005) found that there is little evidence
of a major recent shift in tool selection in environmental policy towards
weaker or more consensual instruments.
In countries with national health service (NHS) systems, it is true that,
by comparison with the high tide of social democracy in the 1970s, there
has been subsequently much more contracting-out and use of public–
private partnerships for capital finance in everything from hospital clean-
ing (although worries about hospital-acquired infection in the 2000s led to
many such contracts being taken back in house) to construction, IT and
clinical services such as elective surgery. Yet the British NHS, supposedly
the apogee of direct government, was built entirely on self-employment
because general practitioners in primary care and consultants in the
secondary sector were always independent. Social care for older people
in the UK was never fully municipalized: voluntary and small-scale com-
mercial provision of residential, nursing and domiciliary services was an
important part of the mix from the 1940s.
Some might argue that the quality of strategic, ideological commit-
ment to these tools rather than direct government provision has grown
significantly in many countries since the 1980s. Yet if governance were
now to be redefined as a normative ideology rather than a measure of

empirical inter-sectoral relations in, for example, welfare state services,

then we should not emphasize any discontinuity in the 1980s. Britain’s ‘new
Liberal’ and then coalition governments from 1909 until 1945 mainly used
the private and voluntary sectors to develop welfare services and did so
in significant part from ideological commitment. Lloyd George’s reforms
achieved in 1911 set the pattern in which the state assumed responsibility
for both financing from taxes and administering the payment of cash bene-
fits such as pensions, while health and what could now be called social care,
were organized through a mix of taxpayer-subsidized insurance or vouchers
and municipal arrangements in strategic partnership with charities. Rather,
it would be more candid to acknowledge that the period between 1945 and
1980 was the aberration from a longer-run trend that drove developments,
in Britain’s case, from the 1906 general election. The important discontinu-
ity would therefore be the 1945 election, not that of 1979.
Far from the period since the 1980s having seen a decline in tight rule-
based control, there has been sustained innovation since then in instruments
of tight rule-bound control over provision of public services across sectors,
especially in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, but in
many European countries too. True, few services previously run by private
companies and voluntary bodies have been taken over by direct govern-
ment organization, except in emergencies such as the post-2007 financial
crisis when many countries found no alternative to nationalizing banks to
prevent systemic risk. Yet in all other respects, the growth of regulation of
everything from the prohibition of sole practitioner surgeries in primary
care after the Shipman murders to requirements to publish ‘kill rates’ for
surgeons has greatly increased government control over these profession-
als, who for decades operated with professional autonomy in the NHS on
a scale to which their contemporary epigones cannot aspire. Performance
management and regulation in policing, education, health, social care,
local government (Hood et al., 1999; Barber, 2007; Boyne et al., 2006),
computer- based workflow control, ballooning detail in contracts and
soaring expenditure in procurement oversight have been extended to areas
previously subject to discretion and professional autonomy or guidance
and persuasive norm-setting. New regulatory agencies setting both price
and output quality targets for public transport and essential utilities were
established early in the period, followed by others for schools, hospitals,
care homes and other bodies. Integration of performance management
systems with payment systems advanced steadily during the 1990s and
2000s. Retrospective oversight for control using financial review through
audit was extended, with new roles for supreme audit institutions in the
assessment of ‘value for money’ (Power, 1999, 2000). In the process of
substituting first general management authority for collegial professional

domination of management in hospitals and then centrally specified

target-based control for staff, professional autonomy in both its individual
and its informal collegial forms has been directly challenged and steadily
eroded, while formal collegial professional organization has increasingly
become co-opted into the administration of performance management
through peer review in clinical governance in health care (Harrison, 2002).
Greater use of private companies and voluntary organizations to
provide public services does not mean that relations between these agen-
cies and their public sector funders and regulators are any more ‘hori-
zontal’, ‘collaborative’, based on ‘trust’, or any less ordered around the
exercise of control (both effectively and ineffectively), than were previous
relations with direct service-providing bodies. Rather, the means by which
tight vertical control is sustained have shifted from reliance on informal
internal influence to formal external influence, as major recent empiri-
cal studies on domestic services have shown (Bell and Hindmoor, 2009;
Laffin, 2013; Laffin et al, 2013; Davies, 2005, 2011; Whitehead, 2003). The
argument is reinforced by theoretical arguments from positions as diverse
as those of Larsson (2013) and Papadopoulos (2010). Interestingly, the
empirical finding is accepted both by Davies (2011), who disapproves of
tight control, and Provan (Kenis and Provan, 2006; Provan and Kenis,
2008), who welcomes central authority structures in local service provi-
sion systems as essential for improved performance. Similar findings have
been reported on supranational decision- making processes sometimes
supposed to be egalitarian (Börzel, 2010).
The financial crisis and general economic depression since 2007 have
shifted patterns of formal public regulation away from ‘light- touch’
oversight of procedures and process towards more prescriptive controls
of substantive risks in financial services. In other policy fields, too, many
countries have been tightening regulation. In several countries sanctions
for breaches of data protection and privacy regulators’ investigatory
powers have been increased. Following major crashes in several countries
in the 1990s and early 2000s, passenger rail safety regulation has been
tightened. After failures of social work oversight led to deaths of children
known to social services in England, Scotland, Belgium and elsewhere,
and after abuse scandals in care homes and geriatric wards and other
hospital services, regulation has been tightened in the social services. In
general, therefore, regulatory stances have grown more prescriptive and
inspection more onerous.
Internationally, alongside the decay of older centrally led structures
such as the Western Alliance under US leadership and the Warsaw Pact,
there has been a steady wave of innovation in new forms of rule-based
authority of both formal and informal kinds. This has not occurred only

through formal treaty structures or courts with powers over national

jurisdictions such as the International Criminal Court. It has also flowed
through bodies without legal authority but able to use standard-setting
on an authoritative basis in banking under the Basel system, interna-
tional accounting standards, World Trade Organization dispute resolu-
tion mechanisms, ICANN and other Internet rule-making bodies, and
a plethora of sectorally specific bodies (Dunoff and Trachtman, 2009;
Avant et al., 2010) and many standard-setting organizations (Brunsson
et al., 2000). Indeed, few of these bodies are free from informal and back-
stairs influence by the major national powers. The USA, China and the
EU exercise informal influence and control in many global institutions
(Stone, 2011; Lake, 2009). But this only reinforces the point that, far from
the last two decades seeing a general decline in authority-based systems of
control and rule-making that sustains differences of status (although not
necessarily hierarchy in the true sense), the period has been one of inten-
sive and constant innovation in formal authority and informal influence
within the enduring imperative of hierarchy.
The claim that the 1980s represent a grand discontinuity in the history
of public administration is, at best, greatly exaggerated and, at worst,
false; indeed, the reverse may be closer to the truth. There has been no
general shift from tight rule-based central control to more horizontal,
self-
organized relations. Central governments are not now weaker in
relation to other interests and organizations than they were in the 1970s.
In many ways tight, rule-based central control has seen increasing invest-
ment, innovation and formalization in the very period when governance
theorists suppose it to have been in decline.
GOVERNANCE THEORIES MISUNDERSTAND

INSTITUTIONAL FORMS
Governance theorists did not develop their own theory of variety in

institutional forms. Instead, they borrowed an approach that was fash-
ionable in late 1980s organizational sociology, dividing institutions into
hierarchies, markets and networks (Thompson et al., 1991: for borrowing
in public administration governance literature, see, e.g., Kickert, 1997;
Lowndes and Skelcher, 1998). Unfortunately, the trichotomy is not well
formed. The three supposed types are not of the same order. As stand-
ardly defined, they are neither mutually exclusive nor jointly exhaustive.
Many governance theorists’ claims about them have been undermined by
subsequent empirical research or theoretical developments.
As used by governance theorists, the trichotomy misunderstands

ierarchy. Some hierarchical systems have no single centre of authority.

h
Simon (1996: 185) insisted that systems with single centres of authority are
at most a special subcategory of hierarchy: for him, hierarchy consisted
essentially in partitioning of subsystems – a structured ‘division of labour’.
In the classic anthropological study of hierarchy, ‘Homo hierarchicus’,
Dumont (1980) explained how the nineteenth-century Hindu caste system
sustained hierarchical ordering precisely without a single centre of author-
ity. Dumont argued that multiple centres of authority operating contra-
puntally provided a suppleness that enabled the caste system to survive,
despite the evident disadvantages and even oppression that it brought.
Hierarchy is not just any kind of inequality – after all, free markets and
competition produce quite different kinds of inequality, based on power
and control of resources rather than on status. Nor is hierarchy the same
as domination: indeed, it is the opposite case, for domination is arbitrary,
not rule-based. Hierarchy is that design principle which sustains stabil-
ity in status ranking without needing to resort to domination. Hierarchy
recognizes and indeed institutionalizes diversity without imposing simple
unity, let alone uniformity. Hierarchy consists in asymmetric, reciprocal
but restricted roles for superiors in an ordered division of labour, and
a recognized contrapuntal relation between contrasting principles of
organization. Although the socio-legal theorist Damaška (1986) defined
hierarchy as requiring rule-based superiority, he argued that it is a pro-
cedural system of appeal through stages in executive as well as in judicial
contexts, not a system of prior substantive command by superiors: for
him, in hierarchy each tier legitimately possesses its proper sphere of pro-
fessional action. The possibility of these features is best explained by defin-
ing hierarchy using Durkheim’s (1951) elementary dimensions of variation
in institutional forms, by the combination of strong social regulation with
strong social integration (Douglas, 1982).
For example, Britain’s National Health Service before the 1983 reforms
was organized contrapuntally around dual authority structures of profes-
sion and organization working in both tension and loose collaboration,
yet exhibited many other characteristics of hierarchy such as layered status
systems on both the professional and organizational sides of the structure.
Although many scholars write loosely of the NHS in those decades as a
‘command and control system’, Le Grand (2003: 48–9) correctly pointed
out that there were ‘rather few commands and precious little control’.
Both professional authority and hospital management were largely con-
ducted by guidance, expectation and integration into a common com-
munity of membership rather than by fiat, let alone orders simply backed
by threats. Although financial discipline in the NHS in the 1970s (but not
in the 1950s or even the 1960s) was weak by contemporary standards,

professional control of clinical organization was rather tight (cf. Gorsky,

2008). In a rather different fashion, it would be fair to describe the English
secondary school system of the 1950s and early 1960s as genuinely hierar-
chical in its status system, in its recognized roles for head teachers, local
education authorities, the inspectorate, the national peak associations
(such as the Association of Education Committees) and professional
bodies and for the department. Yet the department issued very few com-
mands, relying instead on guidance, standard setting, oversight of local
planning and incentives through support for capital finance. Schools
and the Department of Education were both strongly integrated into the
‘education world’, as British professionals and politicians of the 1950s and
1960s called it. That ‘world’s’ local education authorities, professional
institutions and leading academics had to be consulted before any major
central guidance could be finalized and agreed. Secretaries of state for edu-
cation were strongly expected not to interfere in curriculum matters, while
their counterparts at health did not involve themselves in decision-making
over the approval of particular expensive new health technologies or hos-
pital management, just as classical Hindu Brahmin castes did not intrude
on matters properly reserved for other castes just because their status was
greater. These self-denying ordinances, recognizing the scope for lower
tiers’ roles, were not simply, as later reformers implied, lax or lazy. Rather,
they were part of the integument of a genuinely hierarchical order. This
feature is entirely obscured by Bevir and Rhodes’s and most ‘governance’
theorists’ account of hierarchy.
Nor is hierarchy the same thing as bureaucracy. Some hierarchical
systems – such as the caste system – are not very bureaucratic. Some
bureaucratic organizations are despotic (as the Nazi and Stalin-era Soviet
state bureaucracies were). Others are ordered around informal cliques or
‘clubs’ (Moran, 2003) rather than being hierarchical.
Hierarchy, properly understood, is not necessarily admirable (although
du Gay’s 2000 one-sided normative case for bureaucracy as impartial and
independent would have been better presented as one for hierarchy). It
has deformations, excesses, inherent incapabilities and dangers, like any
other way of organizing. But the idea of a general opposition between
coordination, which recognizes difference and which does not rely on
command, and supposedly homogenizing and authoritarian hierarchy, is
misconceived.
Understood in this way, hierarchy is an underlying institutional order-
ing that can be realized in a variety of empirical arrangements, of which a
genuinely hierarchical bureaucracy is but one family of many. Governance
theorists risk treating single- organization bureaucracies with directly
administered provision, inter- organizational arrangements marked by

regulation by law-bound dedicated agencies, fields in which ministers have

almost unfettered powers to regulate by issuing directives, national and
local monopsony purchasing systems, performance management schemes,
and settings where the informal power of a rich nation to strong-arm
others could prevail, as if they all exhibited the same ordering principle,
which they do not. Coercion and rule-based authority are fundamentally
contrasting institutional orders, creating quite different types of inequality.
A market – the second term in the trichotomy – is not a single insti-
tutional ordering. There are monopolistic, monopsonistic, competitive,
fragmented, regulated and deregulated markets, weakly structured infor-
mal markets and markets with highly legalistic contract systems. Just like
‘bureaucracy’ but precisely unlike ‘hierarchy’, the term ‘market’ does not
pick out a single elementary institutional form. A market is any empirical
arrangement in which purchasers give providers some form of consid-
eration (even if only in the long run) in exchange for provision; this is
consistent with several kinds of basic institutional ordering.
The notion that use of voluntarily negotiated and priced contracts
constitutes an institutional form that is necessarily non-hierarchical is
a canard. As long ago as the 1980s, Stinchcombe and Heimer (1985;
Stinchcombe, 1990) demonstrated with careful and detailed analysis that
a complex system of hierarchical tiers, powers, controls, authority and
statuses can be and often is constructed through a nexus of individually
negotiated contracts between multiple organizations, not only along a
conventional vertical supply chain but in a complex web: Weber himself
anticipated the argument (Page, 2008). The term ‘market’ was at first
distinguished from ‘quasi-markets’ (Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993) on the
basis that the latter described government monopsony procurement of
services for third-party citizens. Yet quickly public administration schol-
ars dropped the qualifying term. Although Rhodes (1997b) makes much
of the fact that government purchasers need providers of services and
that there is resource dependence between them, it does not follow that
public purchasers are always the weaker party in any such transaction.
There are indeed examples of catastrophic failure of hierarchical control
by government purchasers, of which some of the most egregious and best-
documented fiascos arose in US procurement in Iraq and Afghanistan
after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s and the Taliban’s regimes
(Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2011). In
many fields, public procurement agencies can achieve effective discipline
over providers on many aspects of provision: not all contracts are failures.
The relevant point is not that contracting can fail generally and so too can
hierarchical ordering through contract, both from insufficient commit-
ment and from the deformations of overly tight design (Bevan and Hood,

2006) – after all, so do direct government provision, private markets and

charity. Rather, what matters is that since the 1980s there has been con-
tinuous innovation in the design of tight controls in government contract
specification, in post-contracting inspection and oversight, in the design
of performance incentives and the exercise of regulation, to the point that
government procurement across the range of domestic public services is as
hierarchical as it has ever been and probably more than it used to be, even
in defence procurement during the great wars of the twentieth century
(Bertelli, 2012: 123–45; Alford and O’Flynn, 2012).
Third, the term ‘network’ has suffered catastrophic concept stretching
(Sartori, 1970). Its clearest, most rigorous and most valuable meaning
is as a method of mathematical description and analysis of sets of ties
between nodes (which might be individuals, organizations or even docu-
ments) (Wasserman and Faust, 1994). The method can be used to describe
hierarchical structures that may be procurement markets too (as in Provan
and Milward’s studies – e.g. 1995 – of city and state purchasing of mental
health services and linkages of subcontracting, referral and information
exchange among providers), and to describe highly individualistic and
instrumental tie- formation and exploitation (Granovetter, 1995; Burt,
1992), Alternatively, as in many studies of ‘policy networks’, it can be
used to describe the precise opposite case of tightly bounded, club-like
groups with strong bonds. The term ‘network’ certainly does not, either as
a method of description or in its practical usage in social science, capture
any single institutional form that could be contrasted with hierarchy.
Powell’s (1990) and Bradach and Eccles (1989) began the romanticiza-
tion of anything that could be called a network, as if networks were things,
and claimed that they had a monopoly on trust and self-organization, as if
markets too are not based on trust and self-organization and as if bureau-
cracies could run without trust. Powell’s own subsequent work heavily
qualified these exaggerated ideas, but they have become accepted wisdom
among many ‘network governance’ theorists. 6 et al. (2006) showed, on
the contrary, that quite different kinds of trust are cultivated in different
fully institutional settings, which can be realized in empirical arrange-
ments as diverse as markets, quasi-markets, bureaucracies, communities
and families.
Worse, much of the ‘network governance’ literature indiscriminately
lumps together competitive systems of service providers, collaborative
joint working in large clubs, instrumental bilateral strategic alliances,
lobbying coalitions and even interpersonal ties among civil servants
within the executive all as ‘networks’. Too often, studies from the late
1990s and early 2000s on ‘joined-up government’ (e.g. 6 et al., 2002) were
simply assumed to be about ‘networks’, even though most of the joint

arrangements established under that rubric by the Blair government were

mandated rather than self-organizing, were subject to tight performance
management and central funding, and quite unlike the other phenomena
already lumped together under the term ‘network’. The result was both
conceptual muddle and empirical error.
Because the trichotomy is not made up of three elements of the same
kind but of a fundamental institutional ordering, a cluster of empirical
settings and a method of description, the idea that there could have been
a general transition from one form to another is unsound. Indeed, when
governance theorists such as Kooiman (2003) and Sørensen (2006) used
the loose notion of ‘metagovernance’ to capture direct influence by public
authorities over other organizations as well as such institutionally diverse
methods of regulation, norm-setting, persuasion, efforts to use condition-
ality and changing financial incentives, they implicitly acknowledged that
hierarchical and individualistic as well as other institutional orderings con-
tinue to be fundamentally important, and that the term ‘network’ does not
capture any single distinctive institutional ordering. The arguments about
‘metagovernance’ amount to a tacit admission that conflation and concept
stretching under the rubric of ‘networks’ have gone too far for the notion
to hold any explanatory force. Yet ‘metagovernance’ itself remains so
loose and baggy a category that it hardly represents significant progress.
Progress in understanding diversity in institutional forms will not be
made until the distinction is clearly drawn between elementary or underly-
ing institutional imperatives, empirical settings and methods of descrip-
tion, and quite different conceptual machinery developed at each of these
levels of analysis. This means abandoning the trichotomy of markets,
hierarchies and networks entirely in favour of better-specified theory and
method. In some ways, progress will require returning to older approaches
developed as far back as Durkheim’s (1951, 1995) analysis of elementary
forms of institutions, as recast by mid-twentieth-century anthropologists
such as Douglas (1982) and to Simmel’s analysis of ties (1955) as devel-
oped in sociometric analytic method. One advantage of, for example,
neo-Durkheimian institutional approaches (6, 2004, 2011, 2014a) is that
they provide a clear account of elementary institutional imperatives and
structures that can be realized in a variety of empirical settings. Another
advantage is that the neo-Durkheimian account of institutional variation
can demonstrate that there are forms of great importance in politics and
public administration – such as isolate ordering (6, 2011, 2012, 2014a) –
that are not encompassed in the conventional trichotomy at all. The
advantage of sociometric mathematical network analysis is that it enables
the examination of various measures (at the level of patterns of ties among
nodes) of centrality, density, structural holes, transitivity and nodes with

spanning ties, to construct proxy measures for some of the key symptoms
of all those elementary institutional forms, including hierarchical ones
(6 et al., 2006).
GOVERNANCE THEORIES ARE A POOR BASIS

FOR NORMATIVE ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL
DESIGN
The only strand of theory using the term ‘governance’ that offers extensive
normative argument has been the ‘good governance’ tradition in devel-
opment studies (e.g. World Bank, 1992, 1997). Ironically for the public
administration governance theorists’ claims about the decline of tight
rule-based controls in favour of self-organizing structures, work on ‘good’
governance has been preoccupied with the need for tight legal control
over the public sector in accountability and transparency rules, systems
of redress for citizens and business, and tightly specified laws controlling
property rights and human rights, and the use of rule-based and enforced
conditionality by donors on aid and development investment to buttress
these commitments. As one would expect, those who are sceptical on
normative grounds of the value or the sufficiency or feasibility of tight
rule-based controls generally have not been convinced by the ‘good gov-
ernance’ arguments in development either (Doornbos, 2001; Weiss, 2000).
In public administration traditions, there is rather less convergence
on any scheme of normative claims. True, there continues to be a strain
of writing paeans about ‘trust’ and democratic participation in praise of
‘networks’ (e.g. Sørensen and Torfing, 2005; Torfing et al., 2012). Other
governance theorists such as Stoker (1998) have been willing to celebrate
some aspects of what he then diagnosed as a shift towards self-organizing,
decentralized horizontal structures. More stridently, Rhodes (2000)
stressed risks of unintended consequences, unaccountability, blame-
shifting, and incoherence in systems where public authorities have weak
capacities to exercise tight control over self-organizing groups and clusters
of commercial and voluntary organizations, sub-national authorities and
links among individuals, some of whom may be public servants. Kenis and
Provan (2006, 2008) argue for the normative superiority of such hierarchi-
cal structures in performance. By contrast, governance theorists Sørensen
and Torfing (2005), arguing normatively against state pre-eminence in
rule-making, are more interested in political acceptability and in values
such as participation (e.g. Eversole, 2011) than in performance in respect
of service effectiveness or efficiency.
Unfortunately, the forms of normative analysis of institutional analysis

available to governance theorists are altogether too simple. Stoker (1998)

confined his normative considerations to listing advantages and correla-
tive disadvantages. The concluding chapter of Chhotray’s and Stoker’s
(2009) extensive review and synthesis of governance theories provides
a similar kind of offsetting analysis. Rhodes (1997b), working with the
market–hierarchy–network trichotomy, simply says that ‘it’s the mix that
matters’, but provides no way of telling what would be a better or a worse
mix in any particular condition. A second approach is merely to encourage
the use of multiple criteria for evaluating institutional forms in particular
empirical cases and to forgo any aspiration for generalization (Hertting
and Vedung, 2012). A third approach is that of ‘horses for courses’. In
this approach, scholars try to identify contingencies with respect to condi-
tions of resources, risks and the legacy of social organization on which
inter-organizational arrangements are to be established, which might
argue for the conditional superiority of particular forms (Herranz, 2010).
A grander, cross-nationally comparative version of this approach is sug-
gested by Skelcher et al. (2011). They find fairly coarse contrasts in styles
of inter-organizational arrangements, among countries with consensual
rather than majoritarian democracies and with greater or less buttress-
ing of any independence in power base for voluntary associations. The
authors appear to infer that the context-dependence of forms at their very
high level of aggregation may be normatively appropriate for each of the
‘democratic milieux’ defined by the intersection of those two dimensions.
More promisingly, Chhotray and Stoker (2009) also draw on the neo-
Durkheimian institutional framework (esp. from Rayner, 1999, derived
from Douglas 1982; cf. 6, 2014a) for comparative analysis of the viability
(although Chhotray and Stoker do not use this term) of institutional forms
and mixes (6, 2003: Thompson et al., 1990). Those institutional dynam-
ics rest on trajectories of positive and negative feedback in elementary
forms of institutions (Thompson, 1982, 1992, 2008; 6, 2003). Lacking a
theory of institutional dynamics of this kind and relying on the static and
ill-
formed market–hierarchy–network trichotomy, governance theories
have been unable to develop frameworks for analysing viability of insti-
tutional forms in ways that can examine rigorously how – for example
– legitimacy deficits can in some settings feedback negatively on perfor-
mance very quickly, while in other settings may not do so for some time.
That trichotomy cannot sustain a coherent theory of dynamics because
it mixes one of several underlying elementary institutional forces with
one cluster of empirical settings with a third category of conflation of
descriptive and analytic method with a very wide range of empirical forms.
For the same reason, the static approach offered by Herranz and others
to identifying contingencies has severe limitations: without a theory of

institutional dynamics, it becomes impossible to think through just how

stable or unstable any given empirical context might be, which supposedly
conduces to the superiority of a particular institutional form.
Viability analysis using theories of institutional dynamics must be
conducted before normative evaluation. Until we know what organiza-
tional arrangements might be feasible, risky, costly, or in dynamic tension
with other institutions, in the short, medium and longer terms it is futile
to attempt to prescribe policy design on normative grounds. Viability
analysis does not simply identify prudential risks of cost-ineffectiveness,
a variety of side-effects, political justice risks of illegitimacy or of politi-
cal risks of unpopularity common types of unintended consequences and
so on. Rather, it examines how these risks either reinforce or offset each
other, in a range of plausible scenarios (6, 2014b), Without first undertak-
ing this kind of viability analysis, attempts to examine trade-offs between
rival normative criteria become either ad hoc or dependent on dogmatic
insistence on the superiority of one criterion, come what may.
CONCLUSION
Governance theory served as a useful reminder of some truisms that

were well known to political scientists such as Neustadt (1990) and to the
social administration tradition of analysis of implementation (Pressman
and Wildavsky, 1984; Hjern and Porter, 1981) that government does not
govern alone but in inter-organizational arrangements, and that command
is a rarely needed and often blunt instrument. A generation ago, its valu-
able corrective to some of the inward-looking and descriptive work in the
field in the 1970s and 1980s was welcome.
Now, it is time for public administration to move beyond governance
theory. Even though the volume of output from governance theorists
continues to grow and new adjectives (participatory, network, interactive
etc.) continue to be added and new refinements developed, its positive
contribution to the field is largely exhausted. Unfortunately, governance
theorists allowed their central concepts of governance and networks to
undergo concept stretching to the point that it became difficult to discern
what would not fall within their scope. They resorted to claims of historical
trends that do not bear scrutiny, and that misrepresented systems of rule
in both the post-war decades and in more recent times. The theory helped
itself to a badly formed typology of forms, which mixed levels of analysis
and therefore proved neither jointly exhaustive nor mutually exclusive,
and which could not provide the basis for understanding institutional
dynamics either for explanatory work or for pre-normative appraisal. Its

best known empirical claims have failed. ‘Hollowing out’ proved a poor
prediction. The notion of a general shift away from rule-based authority is
now as clearly threadbare as the implication that the post-war years exhib-
ited the zenith of tight control by command and control – indeed, in many
ways this is the reverse of the truth. Normatively, the romanticization of
‘trust’ and ‘reciprocity’, which governance theory perpetuated long after
the organizational sociologists who first published those ideas had drawn
back from them, now seems quaint at best. At worst it appears to gloss
over special pleading for entrenching the special interests of particular
voluntary organizations or joint boards.
Public administration now requires frameworks of institutional analysis
that provide rigorous modelling of positive and negative feedback dynam-
ics of institutional change as well as of continuity, rather than looking for
another static approach such as that offered by the trichotomy. It requires
understandings of institutional diversity that avoid mixing elementary
and empirical levels, are not subject to concept stretching, are more com-
prehensive than the trichotomy, but can readily be integrated with socio-
metric analysis. Normatively, the field now requires frameworks that do
not claim automatic superiority for any particular institutional form, but
can diagnose weaknesses and risks to viability in each basic institutional
form and might suggest approaches to designing combinations that might
at least offset and constrain the limitations of each form using relations
with the others. I have suggested that the neo-Durkheimian institutional
tradition can offer one account that meets these standards (6, 2013).
Whether or not others find its account persuasive, it seems clear that only
approaches that meet these standards can provide the intellectually pro-
gressive content (Lakatos, 1970) that governance theories no longer have.
NOTE
1. After deciding on this title, I discovered that, in a book review, Boyne (2005, 515) once
also used the same adaptation of Wildavsky’s (1973) title. I am grateful to Chris Bellamy,
Ed Page, Jonathan Davies and the editors for comments on an earlier draft, but all
remaining mistakes are entirely my own responsibility.
REFERENCES
6, P (2003) ‘Institutional viability: a neo-Durkheimian theory’, Innovation: the European

Journal of Social Science Research, 16(4), 395–415.
6, P (2004) E- governance: Styles of Political Judgement in the Information Age Polity,
6, P (2011) Explaining Political Judgement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6, P (2012) ‘Explaining styles of political judgement in British government: comparing isola-

tion dynamics between administrations, 1959–74’, paper presented at the Political Studies
Association annual conference, Belfast, 3–5 April 2012.
6, P (2014a) ‘Explaining decision-making in government: the neo-Durkheimian institutional
framework’, Public Administration, 92(1), 87–103.
6, P (2014b) ‘Unintended, unanticipated or unexpected consequences of policy: understand-
ing how bias and process shape causation: comparing British governments, 1959–74’,
Public Administration, 92(3), 673–91.
6, P, Goodwin, N., Peck, E.W. and Freeman, T. (2006) Managing Networks of Twenty First
Century Organisations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
6, P, Leat, D., Seltzer, K. and Stoker, G. (2002) Towards Holistic Governance: The New
Reform Agenda, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Adams, R.J.Q. (1978) Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions,
London: Cassell.
Alford, J. and O’Flynn, J. (2012) Rethinking Public Service Delivery: Managing with External
Providers, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Avant, D.D., Finnemore, M. and Sell, S.K. (eds) (2010) Who Governs the Globe?, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Badian, E. (1972) Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman
Republic, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Barber, M. (2007) Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of
Achieving Targets, London: Politico’s.
Bell, S. and Hindmoor, A. (2009) Rethinking Governance: The Centrality of the State in
Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bellamy, C. (2011) ‘The Whitehall Programme and after: researching government in time of
governance’, Public Administration, 89(1), 78–92.
Bertelli, A.M. (2012) The Political Economy of Public Sector Governance, Cambridge:
Bevan, G. and Hood, C. (2006) ‘What’s measured is what matters: targets and gaming in the
English public health care system’, Public Administration, 84(3), 517–38.
Bevir, M. (2011) ‘Governance as theory, practice and dilemma’, in M. Bevir (ed.), The Sage
Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2003) Interpreting British Governance, London: Routledge.
Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2010) The State as Cultural Practice, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Börzel, T. (2010) ‘European governance: negotiation and competition in the shadow of hier-
archy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(2), 191–219.
Boyne, G. (2005) ‘Review of Ingraham PW and Lynn LE, eds, 2004, The art of governance:
analyzing management and administration, Washington DC: Georgetown University
Press’, Local Government Studies, 31(4), 514–16.
Boyne, G.A., Meier, K.J., O’Toole, L.J. and Walker, R. (eds) (2006) Public Service
Performance: Perspectives on Measurement and Management, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bradach, J.L. and Eccles, R.G. (1989) ‘Price, authority and trust: from ideal types to plural
forms’, Annual Review of Sociology, 15(1), 97–118.
Brunsson, N., Jacobsson, B. and Associates (2000) A World of Standards, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Burt, R.S. (1992) Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cairncross, A. (1997) The Wilson Years: A Treasury Diary, 1964–66, London: Historian’s
Press.
Caporaso, J.A. (2000) ‘Changes in the Westphalian order: territory, public authority, and
sovereignty’, International Studies Review, 2(2), 1–28.
Chhotray, V. and Stoker, G. (2009) Governance Theory and Practice: A Cross-disciplinary
Approach, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan (2011) Transforming Wartime

Contracting: Controlling Costs, Reducing Risks, Arlington, VA: Commission on Wartime
Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dahlström, C., Peters, B.G. and Pierre, J. (eds) (2011) Steering from the Centre: Strengthening
Political Control in Western Democracies, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Damaška, M.R. (1986) The Faces of Justice and State Authority: A Comparative Approach to
the Legal Process, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Davies, J.S. (2005) ‘Local governance and the dialectics of hierarchy, market and network’,
Policy Studies, 26(3–4), 311–35.
Davies, J.S. (2011) Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony, Bristol:
Policy Press.
Doornbos, M. (2001) ‘“Good governance”: the rise and decline of a policy metaphor?”,
Journal of Development Studies, 37(6), 93–108.
Douglas, M. (1982) ‘Cultural bias’, in M. Douglas (eds), In the Active Voice, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 183–254.
du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organisation, Ethics, London: Sage.
Dumont, L. (1980) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, rev. edn,
trans. M. Sainsbury, L. Dumont and B.Gulati, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Dunoff, J.L. and Trachhtman, J.P. (eds) (2009) Ruling the World? Constitutionalism,
International Law and Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Durkheim, É. (1951) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson,
London: Routledge.
Durkheim, É. (1995) Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. Fields, New York: Free
Press.
Eversole, R. (2011) ‘Community agency and community engagement: retheorising participa-
tion in governance’, Journal of Public Policy, 31(1), 51–71.
Gorsky, M. (2008). ‘The British National Health Service 1948–2008: a review of the histori-
ography’, Social History of Medicine, 21(3), 437–60.
Granovetter, M.S. (1995 [1974]). Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Grigg, J. (1978) Lloyd George: The People’s Champion 1902–1911, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Harrison, S. (2002) ‘New Labour, modernisation and the medical labour process’, Journal of
Social Policy, 31(3), 465–85.
Héritier, A. and Lehmkuhl, D. (2008) ‘Introduction: the shadow of hierarchy and new modes
of governance’, Journal of Public Policy, 28(1), 1–17.
Herranz, J. Jr (2010), ‘Network performance and coordination: a theoretical review and
framework’, Public Performance and Management Review, 33(3), 311–41.
Hertting, N. and Vedung, E. (2012) ‘Purposes and criteria in network governance evaluation:
how far does standard evaluation vocabulary takes us?’, Evaluation, 18(1), 27–46.
Hirschman, A.O. (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hjern, B. and Porter, D.O. (1981) ‘Implementation structures: a new unit of administrative
analysis’, Organisational Studies, 2(3), 211–27.
Holliday, I. (2000) ‘Is the British state hollowing out?’, Political Quarterly, 71(2), 167–76.
Hood, C., Scott, C., James, O., Jones, G.W. and Travers, T. (1999), Regulation Inside
Government: Waste-watchers, Quality Police and Sleaze-busters, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jordan, A., Wurzel, R.K.W. and Zito, A. (2005), ‘The rise of “new” policy instruments in
comparative perspective: has governance eclipsed government?’, Political Studies, 53(3),
477–96.
Kenis, P. and Provan, K.G. (2006) ‘The control of public networks’, International Public
Management Journal, 9(3), 227–47.
Kickert, W.J.M. (1997) ‘Public governance in the Netherlands: an alternative to Anglo-
American “managerialism”’, Public Administration, 75(4), 731–52.
Kooiman, J. (2003) Governing as Governance, London: Sage.

Krasner, S.D. (1995) ‘Compromising Westphalia’, International Security, 20(3), 115–51.

Laffin, M. (2013) ‘A new politics of governance or an old politics of central–local relations?
Labour’s reform of social housing tenancies in England’, Public Administration, 91(1),
195–210.
Laffin, M., Mawson, J. and Ormston, C. (2013) ‘Public services in a “post-democratic age”:
an alternative framework to network governance’, Environment and Planning C.
Lakatos, I. (1970) ‘Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes’,
in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–196.
Lake, D.A. (2009) Hierarchy in International Relations, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Larsson, O.L. (2013) ‘Sovereign power beyond the state: a critical reappraisal of governance
by networks’, Critical Policy Studies, doi:10.1080/19460171.2013.784624.
Le Grand, J. (2003) Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and
Queens, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Le Grand, J. and Bartlett, W. (eds) (1993) Quasi-markets and Social Policy, Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Lowndes, V and Skelcher, C.K. (1998) ‘The dynamics of multi-organizational partnerships:
an analysis of changing modes of governance’, Public Administration, 76(2), 313–33.
Marsh, D., Richards, D. and Smith, M. (2003) ‘Unequal plurality: towards an asymmetric
power model of British politics’, Government and Opposition, 38(3), 306–32.
Moran, M. (2003) The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-innovation,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neustadt, R.E. (1990) Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of
Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, New York: Free Press.
Osiander, A. (2001) ‘Sovereignty, international relations, and the Westphalian myth’,
International Organization, 55(2), 251–87.
Page, E.C. (2008) ‘Farewell to the Weberian state? Classical theory and modern bureau-
cracy’, Zeitschrift für Staats-und Europawissenschaften, 1(4), 485–504.
Page, E.C. (2012) Policies without Politicians: Bureaucratic Influence in Comparative
Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Page, E.C. and Jenkins, B. (2005) Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands,
Papadopoulos, Y. (2010) ‘Accountability and multi-level governance: more accountability,
less democracy?’, West European Politics, 33(5), 1030–49.
Peck, E.W. and 6, P (2006) Beyond Delivery? Policy Implementation as Sense-making and
Settlement, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pemberton, H. (2004) Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Peters, B.G. and Pierre, J. (2000) Governance, Politics and the State, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Powell, W.W. (1990) ‘Neither market nor hierarchy: network forms of organisation’,
Research in Organisational Behaviour, 12, 295–336.
Power, M. (1999) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Power, M. (2000) ‘The audit society – second thoughts’, International Journal of Auditing,
4, 111–19.
Pressman, J.L. and Wildavsky, A. (1984) Implementation: How Great Expectations in
Washington are Dashed in Oakland, 3rd edn, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Provan, K.G, and Kenis, P. (2008) ‘Modes of network governance: structure, management,
and effectiveness’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(2), 229–52.
Provan, K.G. and Milward, H.B. (1995) ‘A preliminary theory of network effectiveness:
a comparative study of four community mental health systems’, Administrative Science
Quarterly, 40(1), 1–33.
Rayner, S. (1999) ‘Mapping institutional diversity for implementing the Lisbon principles’,
Ecological Economics, 31(2), 259–74.

Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997a) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance,

Reflexivity and Accountability, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997b) ‘From marketisation to diplomacy: it’s the mix that matters’,
Australian Journal of Public Administration, 56(2), 40–53.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2000) ‘The governance narrative: key findings and lessons from the
ESRC’s Whitehall programme’, Public Administration, 78(2), 345–63.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2011) Everyday Life in British Government, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Rosenau, J.N. (1992) ‘Governance, order and change in world politics’, in J.N. Rosenau
and E.-O. Czempiel (eds), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World
Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–29.
Salamon, L.M. (ed.) (2002), The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance, New
York: Oxford University Press.
Sartori, G. (1970) ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’, American Political
Science Review, 64(4), 1033–53.
Simmel, G. (1955) Conflict and the Web of Group- affiliations, trans. K.H. Wolff and
R. Bendix, New York: Free Press.
Simon, H.A. (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Skelcher, C., Klijn, E.-H., Kübler, D., Sørensen, E. and Sullivan, H. (2011) ‘Explaining the
democratic anchorage of governance networks: evidence from four European countries’,
Administrative Theory and Praxis, 33(1), 7–38.
Sørensen, E. (2006) ‘Metagovernance: the changing role of politicians in processes of demo-
cratic governance’, American Review of Public Administration, 36(1), 98–114.
Sørensen, E. and Torfing, J. (2005) ‘The democratic anchorage of governance networks’,
Scandinavian Political Studies, 2(3), 195–218.
Stinchombe, A.L. (1990) Information and Organisations, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Stinchombe, A.L. and Heimer, C.A. (1985), Organisational Theory and Project Management:
Administering Uncertainty in Norwegian Offshore Oil, Bergen: Norwegian University
Press.
Stoker, G. (1998) ‘Governance as theory: five propositions’, International Social Science
Journal, 50(155), 17–28.
Stone, R.W. (2011) Controlling Institutions: International Organisations and the Global
Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern
International Relations, London: Verso.
Thompson, G., Frances, J., Levačić, R. and Mitchell, J. (eds) (1991) Markets, Hierarchies
and Networks: The Coordination of Social Life, London: Sage.
Thompson, M. (1982) ‘A three-dimensional model’, in M. Douglas (ed.), Essays in the
Sociology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 31–63.
Thompson, M. (1992) ‘The dynamics of cultural theory and their implications for the enter-
prise culture’, in S. Hargreaves Heap and A. Ross (eds), Understanding the Enterprise
Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
pp. 182–202.
Thompson, M. (2008) Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and Non-linear Theory of
Institutional Emergence and its Implications, Axminster: Triarchy Press.
Thompson, M., Ellis, R.J. and Wildavsky, A. (1990) Cultural Theory, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Torfing, J., Peters, B.G., Pierre, J. and Sørensen, E. (2012) Interactive Governance: Advancing
the Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Kersbergen, K. and Becker, U. (1988) ‘The Netherlands: a passive social democratic
welfare state in a Christian Democratic ruled society’, Journal of Social Policy, 17(4),
477–99.
Van Kersbergen, K. and van Waarden, F. (2004), ‘“Governance” as a bridge between
disciplines: cross-disciplinary inspiration regarding shifts in governance and problems

of governability, accountability and legitimacy’, European Journal of Political Research,

43(2), 143–71.
Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weiss, T. (2000) ‘Governance, good governance and global governance: conceptual and
actual challenges’, Third World Quarterly, 21(5), 795–814.
Whitehead, M. (2003) ‘“In the shadow of hierarchy”: meta-governance, policy reform and
urban regeneration in the West Midlands’, Area, 35(1), 6–14.
Wildavsky, A. (1973) ‘If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing’, Policy Sciences, 4(2),
127–53.
World Bank (1992) Governance and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank (1997) The State in a Changing World, Washington, DC: World Bank.
Zimmeck, M. (1985) ‘Gladstone holds his own: the origins of income tax relief for life insur-
ance policies’, Historical Review, 58(138), 167–88.

4. Executive governance and its puzzles
R.A.W. Rhodes and Anne Tiernan
The phrase ‘executive governance’ refers to the merger of two discrete

bodies of work, the study of executive government in political science
and the study of governance in public administration. We focus on their
intersection – on common ground and shared puzzles. We start with a brief
account of the several approaches to executive studies in political science,
and of the various waves in the study of governance. We cover the core
executives of Westminster and Western Europe parliamentary polities.
After this conspectus of the literature, we devote most of our attention to
the shared puzzles where executive studies and governance intersect. We
focus on four puzzles: predominant or collaborative leadership; central
capability or implementation; formal or informal coordination; and politi-
cal accountability or webs of accountabilities. We conclude with some
suggestions about directions for future research under the headings of the
interpretive turn, court politics and presidential studies.
APPROACHES TO EXECUTIVE GOVERNMENT
This section introduces briefly the main approaches to the analysis of

executive government that are directly relevant to the study of govern-
ance. We focus on: formal institutional analysis; modernist empiricism;
political biography; the core executive; and the predominant prime min-
ister. We realize that this listing is not exhaustive. It omits, for example,
rational choice analysis and the psychology of political leadership
because they do not engage with the literature on governance (but see
Rhodes, 2006a).
Formal Institutional Analysis
Eckstein (1963: 10–11) points out that
If there is any subject matter at all which political scientists can claim exclu-
sively for their own, a subject matter that does not require acquisition of the
analytical tools of sister-fields and that sustains their claim to autonomous
existence, it is, of course, formal-legal political structure.
81

(See also Rhodes, 2006b.) Perhaps the most famous example of this
approach is the work on Westminster polities. This notion is remarkably
diffuse but commonly refers to a family of ideas that includes: parliamen-
tary sovereignty; strong cabinet government; ministerial responsibility,
where ministers are individually and collectively accountable to par-
liament; a professional, non- partisan public service; and a legitimate
opposition (Rhodes et al., 2009: ch. 1).
Most relevant for our discussion is the notion of the ‘efficient secret’
of ‘the closer union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and leg-
islative powers’ (Bagehot, 1963: 65). In the 2000s, parliamentary govern-
ment continues to be defined by this buckle. For Shugart (2006: 348), the
executive arises out of the legislative assembly, and can be dismissed by a
vote of ‘no confidence’ by that legislature. So, the party or parties with a
majority in parliament form the executive, defined by key positions (that
is, prime minister and cabinet). The cabinet is collectively responsible for
its decisions, and its members (or ministers) are individually responsible to
parliament for the work of their departments. The Westminster approach
also assumes that power lies with specific positions and the people who
occupy those positions. Examples of work in this tradition include Birch
(1964), Jennings (1959) and Wheare (1963).
Modernist Empiricism
Modernist empiricism (sometimes labelled positivism or behavioural-

ism) treats institutions such as legislatures, constitutions and executives
as discrete, atomized objects to be compared, measured and classified. It
adopts comparisons across time and space as a means of uncovering regu-
larities and probabilistic explanations to be tested against neutral evidence
(see Bevir and Rhodes, 2006: ch. 5). The favoured method is the survey.
For example, Blondel and Müller-Rommel’s (1993: 15) work on Western
Europe studies the ‘the interplay of one major independent variable – the
single-party or coalition character of the cabinet – with a number of struc-
tural and customary arrangements in governments, and of the combined
effect of these factors on decision making processes’ in 12 West European
cabinets. It is ‘a fully comparative analysis’ with data drawn from a survey
of 410 ministers in nine countries; and an analysis of newspaper reports
on cabinet conflicts in 11 countries. Similarly, Aberbach et al. (1981)
conducted a survey of politicians and bureaucrats in seven countries,
exploring their social origins, their roles and styles in policy making, their
ideology, their commitment to democratic principles, and the interactions
between politicians and bureaucrats.

Executive governance and its puzzles 83
Political Biography
‘Life history’ refers to auto/biography and the collection and use of per-
sonal documents – memoir, diary, oral history, and other personal docu-
ments and stories – to write ‘a life’ (Denzin, 1989: ch. 2, Roberts, 2002:
ch. 3). Marquand’s (2009: 189) appellation ‘tombstone biography’ remains
apt. It refers to ‘an ingrained centuries-old habit of mind’ in which ‘biogra-
phers take it for granted that their task is to portray their subject as more
worthy than she or he might otherwise be thought to be’ (Pimlott, 1994:
157). For all the dangers of becoming ‘valets to the famous’ (ibid.: 159),
this tradition has produced many accomplished life histories. The volume
of ‘private information’ reported in the work of biographers is impressive,
and will bear such secondary analysis as mapping the membership of the
prime-ministerial courts (see the section on ‘Court Politics’ below).
Life history can be a tool for answering broader questions in the study
of politics that go beyond the life itself; they are not just chronological
narratives (Walter, 2002; Rhodes, 2012a). Often the uses of biography are
cast in general terms. Thus Pimlott (1999: 39, 41) writes about ‘a character
in an environment’ because it ‘illuminates a changing environment’. He
wrote about Harold Wilson ‘as a way of assessing the change of attitudes
that swept Britain in the post-war period, and especially in the 1960s’. So,
political scientists writing life history can and do apply insights from the
academic study of politics.
Core Executive
The core executive approach was developed in the analysis of British gov-
ernment by Dunleavy and Rhodes (1990), but it has travelled well (Elgie,
1997, 2011). It defines the executive in functional terms. So, instead of
asking which position is important, we can ask which functions define
the innermost part or heart of government. For example, the core func-
tions of the British executive are to pull together and integrate central
government policies and to act as final arbiters of conflicts between differ-
ent elements of the government machine. These functions can be carried
out by institutions other than prime minister and cabinet; for example
the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. But power is contingent and rela-
tional; that is, it depends on the relative power of other actors and events.
Ministers depend on the prime minister for support in getting funds from
the Treasury. In turn, prime ministers depend on their ministers to deliver
the party’s electoral promises. Both ministers and prime ministers depend
on the health of the global economy for a stable currency and economic
growth to ensure the necessary financial resources are available. This

power-dependence approach focuses on the distribution of such resources

as money and authority in the core executive and explores the shifting
patterns of dependence between the several actors. Power relations vary
because all core executive actors have some resources, but no one con-
sistently commands all the resources necessary to achieve their goals. So
they exchange such resources as, for example, money, legislative author-
ity or expertise. These exchanges take the form of games in which actors
manoeuvre for advantage. The term ‘core executive’ directs our attention,
therefore, to the key questions of ‘who does what’ and ‘who has what
resources’ (for examples of work in this idiom see: Elgie, 1997, 2011;
Rhodes, 1995; Smith, 1999 and their citations).
Prime-ministerial Predominance
This thesis is associated with the work of Richard Heffernan. He argues

that the proposition that power is relational and based on dependency is
only partially accurate. Power is relational between actors but it is also loca-
tional. It is dependent on where actors are to be found in the core executive, and
whether they are at the centre or the periphery of key core executive networks.
(Heffernan, 2003: 348)
Power-dependence characterizes core executive relationships, so Heffernan

focuses on the distribution and dispersal of resources and shifting patterns
of dependence between multiple actors. Prime ministers command many
‘institutional resources’, including patronage, prestige, authority, political
centrality and policy reach, knowledge, information and expertise, control
of the agenda, and Crown Prerogative, for example to delegate powers
and responsibilities to ministers and departments (ibid.: 356–7). They also
have ‘personal resources’ such as reputation, skill and ability; association
with political success; public popularity; and high standing in their party
(ibid.: 351; Heffernan, 2005: 16). It follows that the more resources prime
ministers have, or can accumulate, the greater their potential for predomi-
nance. But many ministers also have resources that are not necessarily
available to prime ministers. They can include ‘a professional, permanent
and knowledgeable staff, expert knowledge and relevant policy networks,
time, information, and, not least, an annual budget’ (ibid.: 614). There is
much variation between countries but the minister without resources is the
exception rather than the rule.
From the start, Heffernan’s (2003: 350) argument about predominance
had many qualifications. He suggested that prime- ministerial author-
ity is ‘contingent and contextual’. Prime ministers have the ‘potential’
to be predominant ‘but only when personal resources are married with

institutional power resources, and when the prime minister is able to use
both wisely and well’. So the prime minister’s personal resources are ‘never
guaranteed. They come and go, are acquired and are squandered, are won
and lost’ (ibid.: 356). Later versions of the prime-ministerial dominance
argument also make significant qualifications (Heffernan, 2005: 616–17).
In short, contingency, or one damned thing after another, means that
predominance is transient.
So we read the later Heffernan (2005) and Bennister and Heffernan
(2011) as an important set of qualifications to the prime-ministerial pre-
dominance argument. It is significant that they wrote their first version
during the heyday of the Blair ‘presidency’, while their qualifications
reflect his later decline. In his most recent article, in reply to Dowding
(2013), Heffernan (2013: 642, 643) emphasizes that prime ministers can
have ‘more or less political capital’ and their ‘power waxes and wanes’.
These qualifications downplay prime-ministerial predominance and bridge
the gap between their approach and proponents of the core executive (see
the section on ‘Predominant or Collaborative Leadership’).
APPROACHES TO GOVERNANCE
The literature on governance is large and scattered (see Kjær, 2004; Pierre,
2000). We describe the main waves of governance in the study of public
administration: network governance and metagovernance (and for more
detail see Rhodes, 2012b).
Network Governance
The network governance literature has been reviewed and classified many
times (Börzel, 1998, 2011; Klijn, 1997, 2008; Rhodes, 1990, 2006c). We
offer only a brief recap of the several strands (see the section on ‘The
Interpretive Turn’ below).
In Britain, the first wave of governance narratives is referred to as the
‘Anglo-governance school’ (Marinetto, 2003). It starts with the notion of
policy networks or sets of organizations clustered around a major govern-
ment function or department. Central departments need the cooperation
of such groups to deliver services. For many policy areas, actors are inter-
dependent and decisions are a product of their game-like interactions,
rooted in trust and regulated by rules of the game negotiated and agreed
by the participants. Trust and reciprocity are essential for cooperative
behaviour and, therefore, the existence of the network. These networks
are a distinctive coordinating mechanism different from markets and

ierarchies and not a hybrid of them. Such networks have a significant

h
degree of autonomy from the state – they are self-organizing – although
the state can indirectly and imperfectly steer them (Rhodes, 1997: 53). In
sum, for the ‘Anglo-governance school’, governance refers to governing
with and through networks (see Rhodes, 2007).
In Germany, there is the work of Renate Mayntz, Fritz Schapf and their
colleagues at the Max Planck Institute on Steuerungtheorie (see, e.g., Marin
and Mayntz, 1991; Scharpf, 1997). They were among the first to treat net-
works, not as interest-group intermediation, but as a mode of governance.
In the Netherlands, scholars at the Erasmus University focused on more
effective ways of steering networks; see, for example, Kickert et al. (1997);
Koppenjan and Klijn (2004). Such ideas caught on rapidly and mutated to
embrace working in partnerships and collaborative management (see the
section on ‘Predominant or Collaborative Leadership’ below).
Most recently, attention turned from describing the growth of networks
to the normative implications of that growth and the questions of how
to find ways of participating in networks that preserve legitimacy and
accountability, and how to hold networks to account (see the section
on ‘Political Accountability or Webs of Accountabilities’). The search
was on for new forms of democratic governance and new mechanisms of
accountability (see, e.g., Bevir, 2010).
Finally, America caught up with Europe and brought its characteristic
modernist-empiricist skill set to bear on networks and governance. If
European scholars favoured case studies, their American colleagues com-
bined ‘large N’ studies of networks (for a survey of this work see Meier
and O’Toole, 2005) with an instrumental view that sought to make the
study of networks relevant to public managers (see, e.g., Agranoff, 2007;
Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004).
Metagovernance
Critics of the first wave characteristically focus on the argument that the
state has been hollowed out. For example, Pierre and Peters (2000: 78,
104–5, 111) argue that the shift to network governance could ‘increase
public control over society’ because governments ‘rethink the mix of
policy instruments’. As a result, ‘coercive or regulatory instruments
become less important and . . . “softer” instruments gain importance’. In
short, the state has not been hollowed out, but has reasserted its capacity
to govern by regulating the mix of governing structures such as markets
and networks and deploying indirect instruments of control (see, e.g., Bell
and Hindmoor, 2009; Jessop, 2000, 2003; Kooiman, 2003; Sørensen and
Torfing, 2007).

Metagovernance refers to this new mix – to the state’s use of nego-

tiation, diplomacy and more informal modes of steering to secure
coordination. As with network governance, metagovernance comes in
several varieties (Sørensen and Torfing, 2007: 170–80). However, these
approaches share a concern with the varied ways in which the state now
steers organizations, governments and networks rather than directly
providing services through state bureaucracies, or rowing. These other
organizations undertake much of the work of governing: they imple-
ment policies, they provide public services, and at times they even
regulate themselves. The state governs the organizations that govern
civil society; ‘the governance of government and governance’ (Jessop,
2000: 23). Moreover, the other organizations characteristically have a
degree of autonomy from the state: they are often voluntary or private
sector groups or they are governmental agencies or tiers of government
separate from the core executive. So the state cannot govern them solely
by the instruments that work in bureaucracies (see the section on ‘Central
Capability or Implementation’ below).
THE PUZZLES
According to the literature on executive studies, we have witnessed the

emergence of the predominant prime minister. According to the ‘Anglo-
governance school’, the core executive’s capacity to steer is reduced or
hollowed out from above by international interdependencies such as mem-
bership of the EU, from below by marketization and networks, and from
within by the competing agendas and ambitions of ministers and agencies.
As Helms (2012: 2) argues:
The ‘governance turn’ in political science moved the focus of political analy-
sis on decision making and problem solving but at the same time cultivated
strongly sceptical views about the possible relevance of individual political
leaders.
We unpack this broad characterization of the relationship between the

two fields of study by focusing on four ‘puzzles’ (Heclo, 1974: 305–6):
predominant or collaborative leadership; central capability or implemen-
tation; formal or informal coordination; and managerial accountability
or webs of accountabilities. We have devised these puzzles to encompass
and systematize the diverse debates in executive governance. In particular,
we focus on shared puzzles – on the intersection of executive studies and
governance.

Predominant or Collaborative Leadership
The classic debate in the Westminster formal institutional tradition (see

above) concerned the relative power of prime minister and cabinet (see
Blick and Jones, 2010: chs 1 and 2), Latterly, the presidentialization thesis
took over from this debate. For Poguntke and Webb (2005: 5, 7), presi-
dentialization has three faces: the executive face; the party face; and the
electoral face. Presidentialization occurs when there is a shift of ‘political
power resources and autonomy to the benefit of individual leaders’ along
each face and a corresponding loss to such collective actors as cabinet (see
also Foley, 2000: ch. 1). The problem with this argument is that it was
both mislabelled and overstated. We do not have the space (or indeed
inclination) to rehash the debate (see, e.g., Dowding, 2013, and the several
replies in Parliamentary Affairs, 66 (3), 2013). We restrict ourselves to
three comments.
First, in the electoral arena, personalization is a prominent feature of
media management in all countries and has a significant if small electoral
effect in most. If we must use presidential language, it is here in the elec-
toral and party arena that it is most apt. We live in an era of spatial lead-
ership in which prime ministers cultivate selective political detachment or
distance from their party and their government, especially their problems
(Foley, 2000: 31).
Second, in the policy-making arena, there is some truth to the claim of
a centralization of policy making on the prime minister. However, this
claim applies to selected policy areas, with the equally important qualifica-
tion that the prime minister’s attention is also selective (see the section on
‘Central Capability or Implementation’ below).
The prime minister’s influence is most constrained in the policy imple-
mentation arena. This arena is conspicuous by its absence from the
presidentialization thesis. It is central to the network governance nar-
rative. In this account, other senior government figures, ministers and
their departments, and other agencies are key actors. Much goes on in
government about which the prime minister knows little and affects even
less. Many of these policy arenas are embedded in dependent relation-
ships with domestic and international agencies and governments, making
command-and-control strategies counterproductive. So there is another
story of prime-ministerial power that focuses on the problems of govern-
ance and sees the prime minister as constantly involved in negotiations
and diplomacy with a host of other politicians, officials and citizens.
We accept that prime ministers can be predominant, but few control and
then only for some policies, some of the time. At this point, the argument
can be helpfully recast taking account of the network literature. Burch and

Holliday (1996, 2004) see the prime minister as the core, or nodal point,
of the networks supported by enhanced central resources that increase
his or her power potential. However, ‘the enhancement of central capac-
ity within the British system of government reflects contingent factors,
including the personalities of strategically-placed individuals (notably, but
not only, the PM)’. They note that such changes are ‘driven by prime min-
isterial whim’ and ‘if they so desire, [prime ministers] try to shape the core
in their own image’. However, their ability to manage these core networks
‘depends on the motivation and skill of key actors, and on the circum-
stances in which they find themselves at any given moment in time’ (Burch
and Holliday, 2004: 17, 20). Similarly, Helms’s (2005) comparative study
accepts that resource exchange is central to analysing executive leadership
(see Elgie, 2011 for further comparative citations). The shared meeting
ground for all sides in this debate is the idea that the prime minister is the
‘principal node of key core executive networks’ (Heffernan, 2005: 613).
We can now introduce a second strand to the network governance
literature. Accepting that central actors depend on subnational and other
actors for the delivery of key services, the network governance literature
explores the limits to command-and-control strategies and explores other
cooperative leadership styles. The literature on collaborative governance
will serve as an example.
Ansell and Gash (2008: 544) define collaborative governance as a collec-
tive decision-making process ‘where one or more public agencies directly
engages non-state stakeholders’ in the ‘formal, consensus oriented, and
deliberative’ implementation of public policy or management of public
programmes. The key question is whether opposing stakeholders can
work together in a collaborative way. The answer is a ‘cautious yes’, and a
key part of that answer is leadership, which is ‘crucial for setting and main-
taining clear ground rules, building trust, facilitating dialogue, and explor-
ing mutual gains’ (ibid.: 12–13). Such leadership is variously described as
hands-off, soft, integrative, facilitative or diplomatic. The shared feature is
that it is not directive, hands-on, or command and control. There is also a
related literature on how to manage networks that focuses on steering, not
rowing (see, e.g., Agranoff, 2007; Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004; Huxham
and Vangen, 2005).
Central Capability or Implementation
With the perceived centralization of policy making, the executive studies

literature focused on central capacity or central capability. Political
leaders are constantly searching for tools that will deliver better coordina-
tion and regulation in a governance environment seen as more pluralized,

fragmented and contested. This environment continually exposes their

dependency and the inability to exert control and influence.
The literature on Westminster governments notes the pluralization of
advice, the growth of central advisory units, and the attendant challenges
for coordination and in managing new dependencies. Among Westminster
governments, prime ministers and ministers traditionally looked to the
career public service for policy advice and for structures and routines
to support their decision- making. Under the pressures of governance
they have relied increasingly on staff in their private offices. The task
of supporting ministers is now shared between partisan personal staff,
non-partisan career officials, external consultants and others. Ministerial
support arrangements have become more varied, requiring someone to
manage them.
A growing body of literature documents the growth of staffing and
support units in the core executive throughout advanced industrial democ-
racies. Peters et al. (2000: 15) note that ‘growth, institutionalization, as
well as politicization and hybridization are common features of the staff-
ing of summits’. The pressures fuelling this growth are said to include: the
24/7 news cycle and the personalization of politics; the exigencies of the
war on terror; increasing demands for domestic policy coordination; and
the pluralization of policy advice (ibid.: 6–11). The emergence and growing
importance of political staff is a response to these pressures and the need
to coordinate inputs from multiple sources, referred to as the pluralization
of advice (Blick, 2004; Eichbaum and Shaw, 2010; Tiernan, 2007). The
consequences of this trend are a matter of dispute. For proponents of the
presidential and predominance theses, this growth of staff support has
strengthened prime ministers at the expense of ministers, cabinet and other
players, allowing them to become predominant (Bennister, 2007; Walter
and Strangio, 2007).
Proponents of the governance narrative observe that this growth seeks
to sustain a command-and-control prime minister when governance is
characterized by ‘rubber levers’. They observe, for example, that the
continuous reform of the British centre speaks of the failure of central-
ized interventions (rarely control). Also, despite a large and growing
prime-ministerial office with its many advisers, the experiences of the
Rudd and Gillard governments in Australia are not obvious examples of
clear, central political direction. None the less, political advisers are now
an essential ‘third element’ in the core executives of most parliamentary
governments (Eichbaum and Shaw, 2010; Tiernan, 2007).
As well as pointing to the limits to centralizing strategies, the meta
governance literature also argues for a new toolkit for central agencies.
Its proponents argue that there are several ways in which the state can

steer, rather than command, the other actors involved in governance

(see, e.g., Jessop, 2000: 23–4; 2003). First, the state can set the rules
of the game for other actors and then leave them to do what they will
within those rules; they work ‘in the shadow of hierarchy’. Thus it can
redesign markets, reregulate policy sectors or introduce constitutional
change. Second, the state can try to steer other actors using storytelling.
It can organize dialogues, foster meanings, beliefs and identities among
the relevant actors, and influence what actors think and do. Third,
the state can steer by the way in which it distributes resources such as
money and authority. It can play a boundary-spanning role, alter the
balance between actors in a network; act as a court of appeal when con-
flict arises; rebalance the mix of governing structures; and step in when
network governance fails.
Finally, a central image in the governance narrative is of a pendu-
lum swinging from centralization to governance and back. Against the
centralizing strategies of the core executive networks, it argues for a
bottom–up, not a top–down, view of government. The focus is implemen-
tation, yet for many the study of implementation is one of ‘yesterday’s
issues’ (Hill, 1997) and an ‘intellectual dead end’ with ‘lots of leads, little
results’ (deLeon and deLeon, 2002). The governance narrative revives the
topic, highlighting that implementation is mediated through the actions
of front-line workers whose perspectives reflect local conditions, local
knowledge and professional norms. Thus Maynard-Moody and Musheno
(2003: ch. 12) argue that street-level bureaucrats ‘actually make policy
choices rather than simply implement the decisions of elected officials’.
They fix client identities, often stereotyping them, which, in turn, fixes
the occupational identity of the street-level bureaucrat as, for example,
bleeding heart or hardnosed, which, in turn, sets the decision premises for
the street-level bureaucrat’s judgements. They manage the ‘irreconcilable’
dilemmas posed by clients’ needs, administrative supervision (of rules and
resources), and the exercise of state power. They are not heroes, but they
are an example of bottom–up leadership of the c omplexities of network
governance.
Executive studies may pay little attention, but implementation remains
a critical issue for governments of all persuasions and a central concern
of the governance narrative. When service provision spans governmental
jurisdictions, and the public and private sectors, it involves markets or
contracts and patient choice, hierarchy or bureaucracy, and networks or
partnerships. Not only does each implementation structure have its own
set of strengths and weaknesses, but mixing these structures can be like
mixing oil and water. Implementation studies dramatize the dilemmas of
core executives confronted by network governance.

Formal or Informal Coordination
The spread of network governance also undermines coordination. Despite

strong pressures for more coordination, the practice is ‘modest’. It is
negative, organized by specific established networks; it is rarely strategic,
intermittent, selective, sectoral, politicized, issue- oriented and reactive
(Wright and Hayward, 2000: 33). For example, John Howard (Prime
Minister of Australia) described ‘a whole of government approach’ as a
key challenge to the Australian Public Service (APS). The APS aim was to
encourage public service agencies to work, formally and informally, across
portfolio boundaries to achieve a shared goal (MAC, 2004: 1). There were
problems. Departments are competing silos. The rewards of departmen-
talism are known and obvious. For interdepartmental coordination, it is
the costs that are known and obvious! Coordination costs time, money
and staff; whole-of-government is a sideshow for most managers. Above
all, coordination was seen as applying to central agencies, serving their
priorities, not those of the departments.
These problems arise before we introduce networks into the equation.
Staying with our Australian example, federalism is a major check on the
ambitions of national governments. The Commonwealth does not control
service delivery. It has limited reach, so it has to negotiate. For example, a
major review of school funding initiated by the Rudd–Gillard Labor gov-
ernment, proposed a new, ‘needs-based’ funding model for the nation’s
schools. The Labor government promised significant funding increases
for public schools, but these schools are mainly funded and run by state
governments. So, although the relevant legislation was passed, the plan
foundered when state premiers objected to the terms of the new funding
arrangements. Despite intense bilateral negotiations and offers of addi-
tional funding, the Commonwealth succeeded in securing the agreement
of only four states (of six) and one territory (of two) before the federal
election in 2013, when Labor was defeated. In short, central coordination
presupposes agreement with the priorities of central agencies when it is
the lack of such agreement that created many of the problems – a genuine
Catch 22 situation.
Networks make the goal of coordination ever more elusive. As Peters
(1998: 302) argues, ‘strong vertical linkages between social groups and
public organizations makes effective coordination and horizontal link-
ages within government more difficult’. Once agreement is reached in the
network, ‘the latitude for negotiation by public organizations at the top of
the network is limited’. However, these remarks presume that hierarchy
is the most important or appropriate mechanism for coordination. Many
years ago, Lindblom (1965) persuasively argued that indirect coordination

or mutual adjustment was messy but effective. Public transit in the San
Francisco Bay Area is a multi-organizational network, and Chisholm
(1989: 195) shows that only some coordination can take place by central
direction, so ‘personal trust developed through informal relationships acts
as lubricant for mutual adjustment’.
Core executives confront two broad tasks in such multi-organizational
networks. They not only have to manage individual networks, but they
also confront a portfolio of networks. Central agencies are the nodal
points for both the portfolio and individual networks. Each central agency
belongs to, and seeks to manage, a group of networks – its ‘multi network
portfolio’ (Ysa and Esteve, 2013). Managing the network portfolio has its
own distinct challenges. The most obvious challenge is to find out which
networks the agency is trying to manage. All too often, an agency has no
map of its own networks, let alone the networks of other central agencies.
There will be no mechanisms for coordinating the responses of a central
agency to either the portfolio or individual networks. Networks are messy.
There are no guarantees of successful results, only the relentless pressure
from the sour laws of network governance and the imperatives of constant
nurturing. The role of any central agency is to manage their network
portfolio, and to provide collaborative leadership.
In sum, coordination is the holy grail of modern government, ever
sought, but always just beyond reach, and networks bring central coor-
dination no nearer. However, they do provide their own informal,
decentralized version, as long as the core executive can tolerate the mess.
Political Accountability or Webs of Accountabilities
A central theme in executive studies that follows logically from the claim
of a predominant or presidential prime minister is the loss of accountabil-
ity. Thus Savoie (2008: 232) argues that centralization suits prime minis-
ters because they can set aside formal processes and get things done more
quickly. But there are significant costs. Savoie (2008: 230, 339) argues
that the key adverse consequences are centralization and the collapse of
accountability. When there are few if any veto points, a powerful centre
can act with impunity, acknowledging no other authority. An Australian
example again is instructive. The 2001 political controversy known as the
‘Children Overboard’ affair arose from the allegation that refugees, also
known as boat people, threw their children overboard to gain entry to
Australia. The allegation was untrue but government ministers deliber-
ately ignored ‘inconvenient information’. Political staffers and public serv-
ants provided ‘plausible deniability’ for ministers in parliament and the
media (for the relevant sources see Tiernan, 2007: 171–2). Veteran political

journalist Paul Kelly (2009: 611–12) concludes that the case exposes a
‘profound failure of accountability’ that was exploited for the political
benefit of the government of the day.
Proponents of the governance narrative also argue that there has been
a breakdown of accountability, but for different reasons. They argue
that conventional notions of accountability do not fit when author-
ity for service delivery is dispersed among several agencies. Bovens
(1998: 46) identifies the ‘problem of many hands’, where responsibility
for policy in complex organizations is shared and it is correspondingly
difficult to find out who is ultimately responsible. He also notes that
fragmentation, marketization and the resulting networks create ‘new
forms of the problem of many hands’ (ibid.: 229). These dilemmas are
often laid bare in the ‘accountability and blame’ phase that follows
natural disasters. The police and fire services would seem to be arche-
typal command-and-control bureaucracies, but responding to disasters
involves many interlaced networks able to react rapidly to changing
local conditions (Arklay, 2012). So, who is to blame when something
goes awry – the bureaucracies or the networks? The inevitable inquir-
ies after disasters struggle with the messiness. Such inquiries call for
clarity of organization when redundancy, or overlap and duplication, is
strength (Landau, 1979).
As Mulgan (2003: 211–14) argues, buck-passing is much more likely in
networks because responsibility is divided and the reach of political leaders
is much reduced. It is common for network governance to be closed to
public scrutiny, a species of private government. The brute conclusion is
that we face a crisis of accountability because centralization weakens tra-
ditional accountability to parliament and the multiple accountabilities of
networks erode central control.
WHITHER THE STUDY OF EXECUTIVE

GOVERNANCE?
Finally, we identify likely trends in the study of executives. We focus on:

the interpretive turn; court politics; and presidential studies.
The Interpretive Turn
First-wave narratives of the changing state focus on issues such as the

objective characteristics of policy networks and the oligopoly of the politi-
cal marketplace. They stress power-dependence, the relationship between
networks and policy outcomes, and the strategies by which the centre

might steer networks. The second-wave narratives focus on the mix of

governing structures, such as markets and networks, and on the various
instruments of control, such as changing the rules of the game, storytell-
ing and changing the distribution of resources. In contrast, the third wave
of interpretive analysis focuses on the social construction of patterns of
rule through the ability of individuals to create meanings in action. An
interpretive approach highlights the importance of beliefs, practices, tra-
ditions and dilemmas for the study of the changing state. It represents a
shift of topos from institutions to meanings in action. It explains shifting
patterns of governance by focusing on the actors’ own interpretations of
their beliefs and practices. The everyday practices arise from agents whose
beliefs and actions are informed by traditions and expressed in stories.
It explores the diverse ways in which situated agents are changing the
boundaries of state and civil society by constantly remaking practices as
their beliefs change in response to dilemmas. It reveals the contingency
and contestability of narratives. It highlights a more diverse view of state
authority and its exercise.
There are many routes to this ‘constructed’ state and governance (see,
e.g., Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; Dean, 2007: ch. 2; Hay, 2011; and Miller
and Rose, 2008: ch. 3). Its singular advantage is that it is ‘edifying’; it
is a way of finding ‘new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of
speaking about’ executive governance (Rorty, 1980: 360). Thus Bevir and
Rhodes (2010) discuss some of the distinctive research topics that spring
from an interpretive approach under the heading of the ‘3Rs’ of rule,
rationalities and resistance. Interpretive theory suggests that, under rule,
political scientists should ask whether different sections of the governing
elite draw on different traditions to construct different narratives about
the world, their place within it, and their interests and values (see the
section on ‘Court Politics’ below). An interpretive approach draws atten-
tion to the varied rationalities that inform policies across different policy
arenas. Britain, like much of the developed world, has witnessed the rise
of neoliberal managerial rationalities and the technology of performance
measurement and targets (see the section on ‘Political Accountability or
Webs of Accountabilities’ above). Finally, politics and policies do not
arise exclusively from the strategies and interactions of elites. Other actors
can resist, transform and thwart the agendas of elites. An interpretive
approach draws attention to the diverse traditions and narratives that
inform actors at lower levels of the hierarchy, and citizens – for example,
the role of street-level bureaucrats (see the section on ‘Central Capability
or Implementation’ above).

Court Politics
Court politics have existed throughout the ages in the Manchu Court,
Imperial Rome, and the English Court during the Wars of the Roses. It is
the stock of fiction, whether the faction of The White Queen or the fantasy
of The Game of Thrones (see Campbell, 2010). In its current reincarna-
tion, the idea marries the core executive to the analysis of prime-ministerial
predominance (Rhodes, 2013). Also known as high politics, the approach
builds on the notions of interdependence and the bargaining games of elite
actors. For Cowling (1971), the high politics approach meant studying
the intentions and actions of a political leadership network that consisted
of ‘fifty or sixty politicians in conscious tension with one another whose
accepted authority constituted political leadership’. High politics was ‘a
matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre’ by statesmen (ibid.: 3–4). For Savoie
(2008: 16–17), the court encompasses ‘the prime minister and a small
group of carefully selected courtiers’. It also covers the ‘shift from formal
decision-making processes in cabinet . . . to informal processes involving
only a handful of actors’. This conception is too narrow. We accept that
there is often an inner sanctum, but participants in high politics are rarely
so few. We prefer Cowling’s more expansive definition, allied to Burch
and Holliday’s (1996) notion that the centre is a set of networks. These
networks are still exclusive. The number of participants is still limited.
But, as well as the core network or inner circle, we can also talk of circles
of influence (Hennessy, 2000: 493–500) – a use that resonates with political
folklore and practice.
There is an increasing number of ethnographic fieldwork studies of gov-
erning elites and their courts (see Rhodes, 2011). Also, the information in
biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and diaries can be treated as raw
data for this approach (see the section on ‘Political Biography’). There are
too many items of journalists’ reportage, auto/biographies, memoirs and
diaries for a comprehensive listing. Recent examples for Australia include
Blewett (1999) and Watson (2002). Recent examples for the UK include
Blunkett (2006) and Rawnsley (2001, 2010).
Such courts matter. They are key parts of the organizational glue
holding the centre together. They coordinate the policy process by filter-
ing and packaging proposals. They contain and manage conflicts between
ministerial barons. They act as the keeper of the government’s narrative.
They act as the gatekeeper and broker for internal and external networks.
The notion also directs our attention to the analysis of rival courts in
departments and in other levels of government. Baronial politics live
inside and outside the heart of government (see the section above on
‘Predominant or Collaborative Leadership’).

Presidential Studies
Scholars of executive governance are often sceptical about the utility of

concepts and ideas drawn from presidential studies, believing that the
differences between presidential and parliamentary government are too
great. However, many argue that parliamentary governments are increas-
ingly characterized by the fragmentation of executive authority, the
growth of the core executive, the pluralization of advice and the increas-
ingly personal and leader-centred nature of prime-ministerial leadership.
So we ask: what lessons can we learn from the presidential literature?
Political Leadership
Theakston (2011: 79) argues that the presidential studies literature holds
significant promise for executive studies scholars seeking ways of ‘under-
standing and analysing the components of prime ministerial style and
skills, within a framework permitting comparison, generalization and
evaluation’. He draws particularly on Greenstein’s (2004) six-point frame-
work for analysing the political and personal qualities and skills of US
presidents. They cover: skill as public communicators; organizational
capacity; political skills; policy vision; cognitive style; and emotional intel-
ligence. Theakston (2002, 2011) adapts this framework to the Westminster
context, arguing that most analyses of the core executive pay too little
attention to the individual characteristics and skills of prime ministers (see
also Verbeek, 2003).
The style and skills of individual prime ministers are indeed significant,
but only as part of a broader analysis of relationships and dependencies –
the ‘court politics’ of the core executive. The presidential studies literature
has long recognized the need also to understand the leader’s operating
context, notably the ‘bargaining uncertainty’ inherent in their role when
there is a separation of powers (Neustadt, 1991[1960]).
Institutionalization
In the USA, the concept of the ‘institutional presidency’ is well established

(Burke, 2000). It recognizes that ‘leadership in the modern presidency is
not carried out by the president alone, but rather by presidents with many
associates’. Scholars of the institutional presidency have described the
development of the staffing structures and advisory arrangements that
support the president. They chart the growth in size and organizational
complexity of the ‘presidential branch’. This descriptive literature contains
few lessons of wider applicability (see the section on ‘Central Capability or

Implementation’). Of greater interest are the consequences of this growth.

First, it creates new dependencies, pathologies and transaction costs that
have not been documented (see the section on ‘Court Politics’). Second,
it provides contending explanations of this growth. For many, it is a
consequence of presidential overload (Ragsdale and Theis, 1997). Others,
however, argue that
White House staff growth is largely driven by successive presidents’ search for
assistance in managing interactions with Congress, the media and the public, as
well as by the long-term rivalry between the president and Congress, and only
marginally by an expansion in the size or workload of the federal government.
(Dickinson and Lebo, 2007: 207)
Presidents have responded to ‘a more fluid, less stable and distinctly more
partisan bargaining environment’ by ‘embracing tactics formerly restricted
to political campaigns’. So executive growth is a response to, and fuels,
executive bargaining. It can be seen as creating a presidential court with all
the interpersonal conflicts and politicking such a phrase implies.
CONCLUSIONS
Executive studies and the governance narrative may interweave but

they have distinct and distinctive foci. Executive studies focuses
on prime-ministerial predominance, building central capacity, formal
top–down coordination and traditional mechanisms of accountabil-
ity. The governance narrative sees networks of dependencies, discon-
nected implementation structures, informal coordination and webs of
accountabilities.
There are connections. Executive studies incorporates the insights
of network governance. The prime-ministerial predominance argument
sees the prime minister as the node of the core executive networks. We
suggest a focus on court politics – on the inner circle and its circles of
influence – and Bennister (2007: 337) agrees. There are shared concerns.
There is agreement on an accountability deficit, even if the accounts of its
causes differ. The two literatures are the opposite sides of the same coin.
The governance narrative explores the limits to executive intentions and
practices. There is a plethora of shorthand phrases seeking to capture
these differences: hands-on or hands-off, top–down or bottom–up, and
rowing or steering, to mention only three. They all tackle the puzzles we
have discussed.
Our puzzles are best likened to anomalies or incongruities. As
Thomas Kuhn (1996: 62–4, 67, 76, 82) argues, anomalies ‘appear against

the background provided by the paradigm’ of normal science. However,

when ‘normal technical puzzling-solving activity breaks down’ and ‘the
tools a paradigm supplies’ are no longer ‘capable of solving the problems
it defines’, then the accumulating anomalies will lead to a crisis and the
transition to a new paradigm. The command-and-control paradigm of
executive government confronts at least four anomalies. We are left puz-
zling about these shared puzzles and the biggest puzzle of all: whether the
interpretive paradigm offers greater edification.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors acknowledge funding support provided by the Australia and

New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG).
REFERENCES
Aberbach, J., Putnam, Robert D. and Rockman, Bert A. (1981), Bureaucrats and Politicians
in Western Democracies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Agranoff, R. (2007), Managing Within Networks: Adding Value to Public Organizations.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Ansell, Chris and Gash, Alison (2008), ‘Collaborative governance in theory and practice’,
Journal of Public Administration Theory and Practice, 18 (4), 543–71.
Arklay, T. (2012), ‘Queensland’s State Disaster Management Group: an all agency response
to an unprecedented natural disaster’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 27
(3), 9–19.
Bagehot, W. (1963 [1867]), The English Constitution, with an introduction by R.H.S.
Crossman. London: Fontana.
Bell, S. and Hindmoor, A. (2009), Rethinking Governance: The Centrality of the State in
Modern Society. Port Melbourne, Victoria: Cambridge University Press.
Bennister, M. (2007), ‘Tony Blair and John Howard: comparative predominance and insti-
tution stretch in the UK and Australia’, The British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 9 (3), 327–45.
Bennister, M. and Heffernan, R. (2011), ‘Cameron as Prime Minister: the intra-executive
politics of Britain’s Coalition Government’, Parliamentary Affairs, 65 (4), 778–801.
Bevir, M. (2010), Democratic Governance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2006), Governance Stories. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2010), The State as Cultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Birch, A.H. (1964), Representative and Responsible Government, London: Allen & Unwin.
Blewett, N. (1999), A Cabinet Diary: a Personal Record of the First Keating Government. Kent
Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press.
Blick, A. (2004), People who Live in the Dark: the Special Adviser in British Politics, London:
Politico’s.
Blick, A. and Jones, G. (2010), Premiership. London: Imprint Academic.
Blondel, J. and Müller-Rommel, F. (1993), ‘Introduction’, in J. Blondel and F. Müller-
Rommel (eds), Governing Together. The Extent and Limits of Joint Decision-Making in
Western European Cabinets. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 1–19.

Blunkett, D. (2006), The Blunkett Tapes. My Life in the Bear Pit. London: Bloomsbury.
Börzel, T.J. (1998), ‘Organizing Babylon: on the different conceptions of policy networks’,
Public Administration, 76 (2), 253–73.
Börzel, T.J. (2011), ‘Networks: reified metaphor or governance panacea?’, Public
Administration, 89 (1), 49–63.
Bovens, M. (1998), The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex
Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burch, M. and Holliday, I. (1996), The British Cabinet System. Englewood Cliffs, NJ and
Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Burch, M. and Holliday, I. (2004), ‘The Blair Government and the core executive’,
Government and Opposition, 39 (1), 1–21.
Burke, J.P. (2000), The Institutional Presidency. 2nd edn. Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Campbell, J. (2010), Pistols at Dawn. Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt & Fox
to Blair & Brown. London: Vintage.
Chisholm, D. (1989), Coordination without Hierarchy. Informal Structures in
Multiorganizational Systems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Cowling, M. (1971), The Impact of Labour 1920–1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dean, M. (2007), Governing Societies. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
deLeon, P. and deLeon, L. (2002), ‘Whatever happened to policy implementation? An alter-
native approach’, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, 12 (4), 467–92.
Denzin, N.K. (1989), Interpretive Biography. London: Sage.
Dickinson, M.J. and Lebo, M.J. (2007), ‘Re-examining the growth of the institutional presi-
dency, 1940–2000’, Journal of Politics, 69 (1), 206–19.
Dowding, K. (2013), ‘The prime ministerialization of the British Prime Minister’,
Parliamentary Affairs, 66 (3), 617–35.
Dunleavy, P. and Rhodes R.A.W. (1990), ‘Core executive studies in Britain’, Public
Eckstein, H. (1963), ‘A perspective on comparative politics, past and present’, in H. Eckstein
and D.E. Apter (eds), Comparative Politics: A Reader. London: The Free Press of Glencoe,
pp. 3–32.
Eichbaum, C. and Shaw, R. (eds) (2010), Partisan Appointees and Public Servants:
An International Analysis of the Role of the Political Adviser. Cheltenham, UK and
Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Elgie, R. (1997), ‘Models of executive politics: a framework for the study of executive
power relations in parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes’, Political Studies, 45 (2),
217–31.
Elgie, R. (2011), ‘Core executive studies two decades on’, Public Administration, 89 (1),
64–77.
Foley, M. (1993), The Rise of the British Presidency. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Foley, M. (2000), The British Presidency. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Goldsmith, S. and Eggers, W.D. (2004), Governing by Networks. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press.
Greenstein, F. (2004), The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style From FDR to George W.
Bush. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hay, C. (2011), ‘Interpreting interpretivism, interpreting interpretations: the new hermeneu-
tics of public administration’, Public Administration, 89 (1), 167–82.
Heclo, H. (1974), Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden. New Haven, NJ: Yale
University Press.
Heffernan, R. (2003), ‘Prime ministerial predominance? Core executive politics in the UK’,
British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5 (3), 347–72.
Heffernan, R. (2005), ‘Exploring and explaining the British prime minister’, British Journal
of Politics and International Relations, 7 (4), 605–20.

Heffernan, R. (2013), ‘There’s no need for the “-ization”: the prime minister is merely prime
ministerial’, Parliamentary Affairs, 66 (3), 636–45.
Helms, L. (2005), Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors. Executive Leadership in
Western Democracies. London: Macmillan.
Helms, L. (2012), ‘Introduction: the importance of studying political leadership com-
paratively’, in L. Helms (ed.), Comparative Political Leadership. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 1–14.
Hennessy, P. (2000), The Prime Ministers. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
Hill, M. (1997), ‘Implementation theory: yesterday’s issues?’, Policy and Politics, 25 (4),
375–85.
Huxham, C. and Vangen, C. (2005), Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of
Collaborative Advantage. London Routledge.
Jennings, I. (1959 [1936]), Cabinet Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jessop, B. (2000), ‘Governance failure’, in G. Stoker (ed.), The New Politics of British Local
Governance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 11–32.
Jessop, B. (2003), ‘Governance and metagovernance: on reflexivity, requisite variety, and
requisite irony’, in H.P. Bang (ed.), Governance as Social and Political Communication.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 101–16.
Kelly, P. (2009), The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia. Carlton,
Victoria: University of Melbourne Press.
Kickert, W.J.M., Klijn, E.-H. and Koppenjan, J.F.M. (eds) (1997), Managing Complex
Networks: Strategies for the Public Sector. London: Sage.
Kjær, A.M. (2004), Governance. Cambridge: Polity.
Klijn, E.-H. (1997), ‘Policy networks: an overview’, in W.J.M. Kickert, E.-H. Klijn and
J.F.M. Koppenjan (eds), Managing Complex Networks: Strategies for the Public Sector.
London: Sage, pp. 14–61.
Klijn, E.-H. (2008), ‘Governance and governance networks in Europe: an assessment of 10
years of research on the theme’, Public Management Review, 10 (4), 505–25.
Kooiman, J. (2003), Governing as Governance. London: Sage.
Koppenjan, J.F.M. and Klijn, E.-H. (2004), Managing Uncertainties in Networks: A Network
Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making. London: Routledge.
Kuhn, T. (1996 [1970]), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd edn. Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press.
Landau, M. (1979), Political Theory and Political Science: Studies in the Methodology of
Political Inquiry. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Lindblom, C.E. (1965), The Intelligence of Democracy. New York: The Free Press.
MAC (Management Advisory Committee) (2004), Connecting Government. Whole of
Government Response to Australia’s Priority Challenges. Canberra: Australian Public
Service Commission.
Marin, B. and Mayntz, R. (eds) (1991), Policy Network: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical
Considerations. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
Marinetto, M. (2003), ‘Governing beyond the centre: a critique of the Anglo-Governance
School’, Political Studies, 51 (3), 592–608.
Marquand, D. (2009), ‘Biography’, in M. Flinders, A. Gamble, C. Hay and M. Kenny (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of British Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 187–200.
Maynard-Moody, S. and Musheno, M. (2003), Cops, Teachers, Counsellors: Stories from the
Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Meier, K.J. and O’Toole, L.J. (2005), ‘Managerial networking: issues of measurement and
research design’, Administration & Society, 37 (5), 523–41.
Miller, P. and Rose, N. (2008), Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and
Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Mulgan, R. (2003), Holding Power to Account. Accountability in Modern Democracies.
Neustadt, R.E. (1991 [1960]), Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of
Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. Rev. edn. New York: The Free Press.

Peters, B.G. (1998), ‘Managing horizontal government: the politics of coordination’, Public
Peters, B.G., Rhodes, R.A.W. and Wright, V. (eds) (2000), Administering the Summit:
Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Pierre, J. (ed.) (2000), Debating Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pierre, J. and Peters, B.G. (2000), Governance, Politics and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Pimlott, B. (1994), ‘The future of political biography’, in Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks.
Writings on Biography, History and Politics. London: HarperCollins, pp. 149–61.
Pimlott, B. (1999), ‘Is contemporary biography history?’, Political Quarterly, 70 (1), 31–41.
Poguntke, T. and Webb, P. (eds) (2005), The Presidentialization of Politics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Ragsdale, L. and Theis, J.J. (1997), ‘The institutionalization of the American presidency:
1924–92’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (4), 1290–318.
Rawnsley, A. (2001), Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour. Rev. edn.
London: Penguin Books.
Rawnsley, A. (2010), The End of the Party. The Rise and Fall of New Labour. London: Viking.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1990), ‘Policy networks: a British perspective’, Journal of Theoretical
Politics, 2 (3), 292–316.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1995), ‘From prime ministerial power to core executive’, in R.A.W. Rhodes
and P. Dunleavy (eds), Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive. London: Macmillan,
pp. 11–37.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1997), Understanding Governance. Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia, PA:
Open University Press.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2006a), ‘Executive government in parliamentary systems’, in
R.A.W. Rhodes, S. Binder and B. Rockman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political
Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 324–45.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2006b), ‘Old institutionalisms’, in R.A.W. Rhodes, S. Binder and
B. Rockman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 90–118.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2006c), ‘Policy network analysis’, in M. Moran, M. Rein and R.E. Goodin
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 423–45.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2007), ‘Understanding governance: ten years on’, Organization Studies, 28
(8), 1243–64.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2011), Everyday Life in British Government. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2012a), ‘Theory, method and British political “life history”’, Political
Studies Review, 10 (1), 161–76.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2012b), ‘Waves of governance’, in David Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–48.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2013), ‘From prime ministerial leadership to court politics’, in P. Strangio,
P. ’t Hart and J. Walter (eds), Prime Ministerial Leadership: Power, Party and Performance
in the Westminster System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 318–33.
Rhodes, R.A.W., Wanna, J. and Weller, P. (2009), Comparing Westminster. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Roberts, B. (2002), Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Rorty, R. (1980), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Savoie, D. (2008), Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the
United Kingdom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Scharpf, F.W. (1997), Games Real Actors Play. Actor-centred Institutionalism in Policy
Research. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Shugart, M. (2006), ‘Comparative executive–legislative relations’, in R.A.W. Rhodes,
S. Binder and B. Rockman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 344–65.
Smith, M.J. (1999), The Core Executive in Britain, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sørsensen, E. and Torfing, J. (2007), ‘Theoretical approaches to metagovernance’,

in E. Sorsensen and J. Torfing (eds), Theories of Democratic Network Governance.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 169–82.
Theakston, K. (2002), ‘Political skills and context in prime ministerial leadership in Britain’,
Policy & Politics, 30 (2), 284–323.
Theakston, K. (2011), ‘Gordon Brown as prime minister: political skills and leadership
styles’, British Politics, 6 (1), 78–100.
Tiernan, A. (2007), Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian
Governments from Whitlam to Howard. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Verbeek, B. (2003), Decision Making in Great Britain during the Suez Crisis: Small Groups and
a Persistent Leader. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Walter, J. (2002), ‘The solace of doubt? Biographical methodology after the short twenti-
eth century’, in P. France and W. St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 321–35.
Walter, J. and Strangio, P. (2007), No, Prime Minister: Reclaiming Politics from Leaders.
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Watson, D. (2002), Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. New
York: Knopf.
Wheare, K.C. (1963), Federal Government, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wright, V. and Hayward, J.E. (2000), ‘Governing from the centre: policy coordination in
six European core executives’, in R.A.W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming British Government.
Volume 2. Changing Roles and Relationships. London: Macmillan, pp. 27–46.
Ysa, Tamyko and Esteve, M. (2013), ‘Networks never walk alone: the governance of network
portfolios’. Paper to the Global Governance Club, Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study in the Humanities and Social Science (NIAS), Wassenaar, The Netherlands, 29
May–1 June 2013.

5. Paradigms of non-Western public
administration and governance
Wolfgang Drechsler
This chapter argues that there are different paradigms of governance

and especially public administration, including the Chinese, Western and
Islamic ones. This means that there is not one global best public admin-
istration, but that what we call global public administration is actually
Western public administration – and, today, that means to a large extent
Anglo-American public administration. Paradigms comprise first of all
the potentiality and theory of forms of what we can call non-Western
public administration (NWPA), rather than reality and practice as we
observe it today. Including a discussion of the recent contributions of the
work of Francis Fukuyama regarding public administration, governance
and the specific case of China, this chapter’s guiding question is whether
we arrive more easily at good public administration if we realize that
there are different contexts and thus either different ways thither, or even
legitimately different goals.
THE PROBLEM AND THE THREE PARADIGMS
The title of this chapter is programmatic: I will suggest and tentatively con-
ceptualize that there are different paradigms of governance and especially
public administration. This means that there is not one global best (practice
of) public administration, but that what we call global public administra-
tion is actually Western1 public administration – and, today, that means to
a large extent Anglo-American public administration (cf. Raadschelders
2013, pp. ix, 216–17; de Vries 2013b, pp. 108, 123) If public administration
(PA) has two dimensions, ethics (goals) and performance (mechanics),
linked though they may often be, ‘good PA’ both works well and is ethical
by its own standards. With paradigms, I mean not only real, existing, but
also potential, historical or theoretical forms of what we can call non-
Western PA (NWPA) – we may also say possible epistemes.
In most social sciences and humanities, to say something like that would
hardly be novel, and even in economics, amazingly enough, globalization
has apparently not led to convergence (classically Boyer 1994). It may do
104

Non-Western public administration and governance 105
so at some point, as even key protagonists of non-Western paradigms,

such as Kishore Mahbubani (2013a), argue, but certainly cultural–ethical
‘differences will remain for a long time’ (ibid., p. 259). In many areas of
scholarly inquiry, especially in the humanities, the opposite attitude of
‘one-Western-size-fits-all’ prevails, perhaps even to the point of what has
been called ‘Occidentalism’ (Buruma and Margalit 2004).
But in PA, this is certainly not the case – here, it is generally, if tacitly,
assumed that there is one good PA, and that this is global-Western PA;
it is certainly the case in scholarship (see Public Administration Review
2010; Raadschelders 2013, p. ix), but even more so in PA reform (cf.
most recently Andrews 2013, passim). In other words, countries and
places that do not adhere to or fail at least to move towards the global-
Western standard (even if this is understood to include significant regional
variations, which is not always the case) are somehow remiss: they do not
provide optimal PA and thus governance. The only excuse they may have
is that they are laggards, they are in transition, but they are expected to
eventually arrive at global-Western PA.
Contrary to this, what I would like to suggest is that, while there are
indeed PA solutions to problems that arise from the nature of PA itself, in
turn based on the fact that more human beings live in society than can be
coordinated personally and directly, the following can be assumed:
A. In different contexts, there are also solutions to common problems

that are different, but not worse; at least some of them are very prob-
ably even better;
B. There are adequate, good, indeed excellent solutions that completely
depend on context – understood here as Lebenswelt2 – which are
neither necessarily worse than the solution proposed by Western PA,
nor move in this direction (never mind the genuine phenomenon, on
many but not all levels of life, of globalization); and
C. The debate whether, for all human beings in time and space, there is or
should be one set of ethics; that is, whether there is a cohesive, unitary
set of universal human values and thus also rights that applies to
everyone, everywhere, at all times, is – although largely the purported
view of international organizations – not really closed and is in fact
the ‘elephant in the room’; much depends on the answer, for PA as
well.3
In 2013, this differentiation moved briefly to the centre of attention of

the scientific community of governance and, though to a lesser extent,
of PA because of Francis Fukuyama’s widely distributed and discussed
essay, ‘What is governance?’ (2013a). Against prevailing global Western

orthodoxy, and following some earlier recent work of his on this issue
(2011, 2012), Fukuyama looks for ways to ‘better measure governance’
(2013a, p. 1). Although highly instructive as such, what is important for
the present context is that Fukuyama defines ‘government’s ability to
make and enforce rules, and to deliver services, regardless of whether
the government is democratic or not’ (p. 3, my emphasis). Governance
is ‘not about the goals’ – ‘governance is thus about execution, or what
has traditionally fallen within the domain of public administration, as
opposed to politics’ (p. 4; see Rothstein 2013 for a traditional critique of
this perspective). According to Mahbubani, this is ‘a distinction which is
almost inconceivable in Western minds’, most of which ‘cannot conceive
of “good governance” as an independent and desirable goal’ (2013b). And
while we do not need to follow Fukuyama in making governance part
of PA rather than the other way round, as is usual,4 the differentiation
between goals and means is key here, because, as Fukuyama says, the
entire point is to study the connection between the two, rather than simply
to assume it (2013a, pp. 3–4).5 He himself had earlier claimed that ‘the rule
of law and democratic accountability are important to high-quality state
performance’ (2012, p. 23), but this is just that: a claim.6 As recent studies
show, the connection of accountability and performance is at best non-
linear (de Vries 2013b; Christensen and Lægreid 2013), and as Mahbubani
(2013b) says in his comment, ‘to put it bluntly, democracy is neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition for good governance’. Altogether,
Fukuyama himself underlines that he is more interested in what I have
above labelled B, rather than C.
The two most obvious potential partners, or challengers, of global-
Western PA as largely independent paradigms are, I would suggest, first
Chinese and second Islamic PA (cf. Painter and Peters 2010, pp. 3, 19).
For the few people dealing with this issue, it is contentious whether there
may be more, and what the other paradigms might be,7 but I would single
out these two for now because they, and I think only they, share a few
significant advantages for such a comparison:
● a large body of theoretical literature

● centuries of practice
● strong relevance today
● a convincing carrier country
● a largely non-derivative system.
This is most clearly the case with classical Chinese, that is, largely
Confucian, and classical Islamic, that is, what one could perhaps call
caliphate, PA. Because of the ‘classical’ part, we will have to look more

at history than is usual in PA – not because of simple notions of legacy

and context,8 but because our concern, as indicated, must be potentiality
rather than current realization and recognition in contemporary scholar-
ship, which certainly is global-Western (see Raadschelders 2013). The
argument is, basically, about an honest basis for a convincing narrative,
or convincing narratives; regarding contemporary empirics, it is therefore
more of an agenda, rather than being based on previous research.
But why would that be interesting to begin with? The abovementioned
equation, global 5 Western 5 good, can be extended by the addition of
‘modern’; that is, global 5 Western 5 good 5 modern. Thus modern
ization would equal Westernization, which would be a good thing. But,
first, the suggestion that modernization, that is, any improvement, auto-
matically means Westernization actually delegitimizes the former in those
contexts in which Westernization is at least an ambiguous concept for
many. Assuming that, often, these are contexts that could really benefit
from it, to show that the improvement of PA does not automatically
mean Westernization, in other words, that modernization is not necessar-
ily Westernization, would be a major accomplishment (assuming that the
goal is not Westernization per se). It may then easily be that countries that
do not follow the global-Western model are not laggards but rather pursue
their own path towards good PA.9 In that case, policy recommendations
(often linked to financial incentives) to move towards Western PA bench-
marks might be not only misguided, but may even turn out to be highly
counterproductive.
This brings us to the second point: if the large-scale global effort to
improve the world by improving governance and PA were to be an over-
whelming success, some serious arguments would be needed that would
speak against such an effort. However, as Matt Andrews has argued in
an important recent book on development (2013), to the contrary, there is
‘mounting evidence that institutional reforms in developing countries do
not work. Case studies and multicountry analyses show that many gov-
ernments in developing nations are not becoming more functional, even
after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars of externally sponsored
reforms’ (p. xi). Andrews proposes a new, highly contextualized way of
implementing public sector reform (pp. 227–31), stopping short, however,
as Fukuyama does, of suggesting that there may be different goals alto-
gether (point C above). In fact, as Andrews shows, even if one uses the
indicators rightly derided by Fukuyama (2013a), fewer internationally
funded development-based public sector reform programmes were suc-
cessful than not (Andrews 2013, pp. 13–15), and according to a World
Bank (2008) evaluation, ‘civil service reforms led to improved quality
of public administration in 42 percent of countries borrowing for such

interventions’ (p. 213), meaning that in 58 per cent of these cases, there
was no improvement at all.
Interest vested in the global-Western paradigm is none the less very sub-
stantial, both in policy and in scholarship, and always has been. However,
during the last half-decade or so, three phenomena have weakened the
assuredness in and of the West that its solutions are the global ones wher-
ever one goes, and this has slowly reached PA as well. One is the global
financial crisis, which has called the Western system into question both
as regards setup and performance, including PA (see Drechsler 2011).
Another is the awareness, in West and East, of the apparently sustainable
(re-)emergence of the largely Confucian Southeast and East Asian ‘tiger
states’, about which more below.
Specifically for PA, third, all this occurs at a time at which it is dif-
ficult to offer a cohesive (global-Western) PA paradigm, because one
no longer exists. After the demise of the NPM as the ruling model
(see Drechsler 2009b, 2009c; Drechsler and Kattel 2009), what we are
facing is a post-NPM Unübersichtlichkeit (fuzziness) with several ‘para-
digmettes’, such as the old NPM and the new one (a response to the
global financial crisis), traditional Weberianism, NPM- plus concepts
such as new public governance and its varied permutations, as well as
public value, and Weberian-plus ones, such as the Neo-Weberian state
(see Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Some beliefs that were held to be true
until very recently have become highly volatile – privatization, say – and
some others have recently become very questionable – transparency as
a goal may come to mind (see Han 2012). So, what is it that the West
can responsibly sell?
THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT PA
But even if there is such a thing as non-Western PA, and even if this can
be good; that is, it works well and is ethical PA, not an aberration or an
atavism, there seems to be also a core of good PA that all systems share,
and there are plenty of grey zones in between (see points A and B above).
In order to clarify this vague-sounding scenario, I would at this point
preliminarily propose three possible models of trajectories to good PA:
Western, multicultural and contextual.
The first is what I have described as the global-Western mainstream:
global 5 Western 5 good (5 modern). All other traditions, including
Chinese and Islamic, would eventually have to converge on the develop-
ment trajectory of this or else be not just different but worse. One may
or may not allow contextual variations, but, in principle, the idea is that

we know what good PA is, that it is universal, that by and large this is
Western PA, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.10
If one does not buy into this narrative, or at least would like to question
it, then the second model would seem to be the obvious, or logical, counter-
alternative. This, which we may call multicultural PA, would hold – it is a
theoretical model – that there is no such thing as ideal PA as such, that good
PA depends entirely on culture and context, never mind at which level, and
that the ways to reach it are also entirely context-dependent and generally
not linked to one another. Multicultural public administration has the
advantage of being politically correct in many contexts (outside of PA);
it is prima facie a good alternative to the erroneous simplicities of global-
Western PA. However, the problems with this approach are manifold as
well, and perhaps first of all, as mentioned and as any NWPA research will
very quickly show, there are actually both problems and solutions that are
germane to PA, no matter where one looks, and solutions may be some-
times different across time and space but sometimes very, indeed strikingly,
similar (see Drechsler 2013c regarding neo-Confucian China).
The third model, the contextual one, would say that the key to good
PA is to realize where one is coming from at the moment and to be in
synch with that, and that means to realize what the context actually is.
Of course, one can look at other systems and learn from them, but in this
context, that would necessarily be policy learning, not mere policy transfer
(see Randma-Liiv and Kruusenberg 2012; a recent empirical case study
in line with this is Christensen et al. 2012). But first, ‘good’ in PA means
primarily ‘fulfilling its purpose in a given context’ – PA is good when it
does what it is supposed to do; like the market in an economy, it does
not come prima facie with values attached, as we have gathered from the
Fukuyama debate mentioned above (certain forms of PA have certain
effects that from certain perspectives have normative connotations, but
not more than that).
Yet this is not significantly different for ethics, especially when we are
looking for truly good governance – a cliché term that clearly begs the
question, ‘Good for whom?’ (see Drechsler 2004). It is pivotal to realize
this, not least for policy. When de Vries sums up an empirical study of
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) by stating, ‘Bad governance seems
to do as good as, and in times of economic crisis even better than, good
governance’ (2013b, p. 122), what meaning does the ‘good’ in ‘good
governance’ possibly retain?
The Hatter . . . had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it
uneasily . . . ‘Two days wrong! . . . I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!’ he
added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
‘It was the best butter,’ the March Hare meekly replied.

As Peter Heath explained this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in

Wonderland (1865),
‘Good’, like its superlative, is often a relative term, meaning ‘good of its kind’,
or for its standard purpose, whatever that may be. Failing such a reference,
the judgment of goodness is indeterminate, and cannot be applied or debated
without risk of confusion. [Thus the March Hare’s statement is right in that the
butter was best as butter goes, no doubt, but not as a mechanical lubricant.]
(Heath 1974, pp. 68–9)
Aristotle, one of the most quintessentially, definitively Western philoso-

phers, ‘the philosopher’ in fact, and the father, one could say, of ethics,
makes almost exactly this point in his political magnum opus, the Politika
(Politics), when listing the necessary qualifications for members of a gov-
ernment or administration:
First, sympathy for the constitution as it actually exists; second, competences

that are in line with the tasks of their specific office; third, a sense of virtue and
justice that matches exactly those of the state in which they live – because, if the
concept of justice is not the same in every state, it is obvious that there must be
different kinds. (Arist. Pol. 1309a; V 9)
How to metaphorize good, primarily effective, PA in context? Let us say

that all paradigms as proposed participate in some solutions that can be
said to form ‘good PA’ in the sense that it does its job in a decent, primar-
ily in an effective and secondarily in a contextually ethical, way, that it
fulfils its standard purpose on any possible level, including institutions,
people and concepts, but that, in general, these are adapted to context.
That means that there may be:
(a) a small nucleus of effective PA that almost always works, tiny because
it must match all performance and all ethics – and (a) is a purely
empirical, not a normative concept; then
(b) a larger one in which such generally valid principles are adapted to the
context and thus work; and
(c) a third level where solutions work well within a given paradigm but
not (necessarily) in any other, which, given the high requirements,
would be expected to be the most common case.
For our limited model of three paradigms, this would, again tentatively
and subject to review, look as in Figure 5.1.
Now, (a) is what is generally assumed to be good PA, and the
contextualized second nucleus (b) is what the more sophisticated PA
research supports today (although it is not the common view), but our

c-Western
Good PA
a
b
c-Islamic c-Chinese
Figure 5.1 Three paradigms of public administration
focus is on (c), the postulated spheres of good PA, each with(in) a certain
paradigm that does not work well, nor does it have to, in any other. If this
is even partially true, then it indeed means that one should not judge, and
try to improve, PA on the basis of and towards the outer (b), let alone the
inner nucleus (a), but just ask whether, under the given circumstances, PA
does its job, or is moving in the right direction.
CHINESE AND ISLAMIC PA ILLUSTRATED
One could actually end at this point, but, even in the current context, a
few brushstrokes sketching out the alternatives to Western PA, of classical
Chinese and Islamic PA and governance, are in order because, otherwise,
the thesis may remain too abstract, and also because much of this is so
counter-epistemic for PA that some examples of both ethics and perfor-
mance might be helpful. I have recently described both the Chinese roots

of modern PA principles that seem to belong to the second and even first
nucleus (Drechsler 2013c) and the effective aspects of Ottoman PA that
belong specifically to its own, Islamic, paradigm (Drechsler 2013b), so
I will limit myself to a few examples, partially drawn from these texts.
The issue is only whether we should discuss Islamic or Ottoman PA, and,
respectively, Confucian or Chinese PA.
Chinese Public Administration or Confucian Public Administration
So, should one talk about Chinese or about Confucian PA? What speaks
for Confucian PA is that it includes, next to Mainland China (with Hong
Kong, which previously belonged to this group as well, and to an extent
still does), also Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan. Of these,
Taiwan carries on the Confucian legacy of the Chinese Empire in the
most direct way, after it was destroyed several times during the twentieth
century, the last time during the Cultural Revolution (see Berman 2010;
Jan 2010; Suleski 2008, pp. 267–70). Of these, as Fukuyama has noted,
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were ‘checked by the international system
(in the guise of the U.S. military)’ (2012, p. 16), whereas Singapore was
voluntarily Western, and thus strong enough to take its own path, rather
than obeying Western advice and fashion (Andrews 2013, pp. 190–91). All
of them are among the great success stories of the recent decade or two
(including, in spite of all its problems, Japan, since the problems occur at
a very high level). And
one of the reasons that the Chinese-influenced parts of East Asia have had a big
leg up in terms of development outcomes is their inheritance of Chinese tradi-
tions of stateness. China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have been able to take a
functioning state for granted in a way that countries in other regions could not.
(Fukuyama 2013b)
Of these, next to Taiwan, it may be especially tempting to speak about

the hugely successful and explicitly Confucian Singapore when discuss-
ing contemporary Confucianism. After all, the father of Singapore’s
success, Lee Kuan Yew, is a self- professed Confucian, and it does
not matter in the least whether there may be doubts about how aca-
demically valid his principles are deemed to be (cf. Bell 2011, p. 97;
see Lord 2003, pp. 101–5; Suleski 2008, pp. 272–5). Fukuyama’s impor-
tant point regarding ethics, that ‘contemporary comparative politics
has largely lost sight of the Aristotelian distinction between kingship
and tyranny, and has no good way of categorizing nondemocratic
regimes that nonetheless can be said to serve a broader public inter-
est’ (2012, p. 18), is very clear in Singapore, and Singapore would easily

compare favourably in most important categories with many Western

countries.
But we will look at Mainland China generally, because this is what
gives Confucianism its main global eminence, and because classical China
was essentially Confucian (in spite of all nuances, including the impor-
tant legacy of legalism and considerable variations of the domination of
schools and religions over the centuries; on legalism versus Confucianism,
see Tan 2011), just as Confucianism is essentially Chinese. Most impor-
tantly, however, for the reasons mentioned above, using China makes
the non-Western alternative more obvious than any other country could
demonstrate.
On the other hand, in many respects China is easy to present as an alter-
native to the Western way: classical China is no longer much of a ‘hard
sell’ in the West. It hardly ever was, for those aware of the sophistication
of the culture, perhaps even less than the legacy of Confucian thought,
but, coupled with the economic and political eminence of China today, it is
quite difficult, the more one knows, to relegate China to an inferior global
position – let alone that of a ‘developing country’, and never mind the less
than 250-year dip in dominance from which it has just emerged. If we look
at the last period when China arguably ‘led the world’, its name-giver, the
Qianlong emperor (1711–99), following great emperors as son and grand-
son, was not only seen as the most powerful, but also as the most wise,
artistically gifted and last but not least just ruler of his time, even by many
in the West (see Elliott 2009; Berliner et al. 2010).
For PA specifically, it is worth recalling the features in which China
was clearly leading. We can assume that the modern state itself started
in China and not in the West (Fukuyama 2011, p. 18); that this is a state
understood very differently from the Western model (Jacques 2011) makes
it even more interesting.
China alone created a modern state in the terms defined by Max Weber. That
is, China succeeded in developing a centralized, uniform system of bureaucratic
administration that was capable of governing a huge population and territory
. . . China had already invented a system of impersonal, merit-based bureau-
cratic recruitment that was far more systematic than Roman public administra-
tion. (Fukuyama 2011, p. 21; see Jacques 2011, p. 2)
And this state was enormously successful – so successful that it was not
challenged until the mid- nineteenth century as regards organization
(Fukuyama 2011, p. 93). ‘It is safe to say that the Chinese invented modern
bureaucracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the
basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection’ (ibid.,
p. 113). What is hard to fathom, even for someone with a Weberian or

French-style étatiste background, is the importance the state and thus PA

had in the people’s mind and understanding – something that is, though in
weaker form, still present in all Confucian countries today.
At the core of the Chinese PA system is the Imperial civil service – and,
as the Qianlong emperor used to say, and as we now again realize, ‘There
is no governing by laws; there is only governing by people’ (Elliott 2009,
p. 152). This is a Confucian point: ‘In Confucian political philosophy, it
is more important to have virtuous people in government than to have
a good system of laws’ (Tan 2011, p. 470; see passim). The – not always
positive, but generally very respected – image of the Chinese civil servant
lives on in his specific Western designation, ‘Mandarin’, a term that also
entered Western PA parlance for its own independent, highly competent
scholar-bureaucrat, especially in the Anglo-American context, generally –
until very recently – with a slightly negative if awe-inspiring connotation
(‘Sir Humphrey Appleby’).
As economic history and to some extent the present show, the domi-
nance of the civil service in the economy was not harmful to the economy,
nor to technological innovation – maybe because innovation flourishes
best within a regulated framework rather than in a free-for-all situation,
although how one judges that depends on one’s own economic faith. And
that even pertains to creativity in the wider sense – MacGregor (2011), in
the context of describing the creation of a Han Dynasty lacquer cup, even
speaks of Chinese Imperial ‘bureaucracy as a guarantee of beauty’ (p. 219;
see Tan 2008a on the general cliché of anti-creative Confucianism and how
to overcome it).
The civil service was created by the famous civil-service exam, the
longest-continuing PA exam or probably educational institution generally
in the history of humankind and the first large-scale competence-based
test for anything, which was abolished in 1904, after altogether 13 centu-
ries, ‘in the name of “Westernization”’ (Elman 2000, p. xxxv; see Miyazaki
1981, p. 125; in modified form, however, it lives on, for example, in the
Taiwanese Examination Yuan and its Civil Service Examination; see
Jan 2010). The civil-service exam largely consisted of a very open written
exam, radically narrowing the group in different stages, which entailed
the formal discussion of the great Confucian classics; it remained largely
stable over the centuries and is thus often seen as too formal and abstract.
(On the exam, see briefly and accessibly Miyazaki 1981; also now Elman
2000, with a strong sociological bias.)
How important the civil-service exam was in China can be seen from
the high esteem in which it, and success in it, was held in Chinese life.
This is because becoming a civil servant was simply the highest position
one could aspire to – ‘the one and only career that mattered in imperial

China’ (Elliott 2009, p. 4), one that granted prestige and wealth both to the
individual and to his family, even to his place of origin. That the exami-
nation was done with the personal involvement of the emperor himself,
who personally graded the final top essays (see Miyazaki 1981, pp. 81–3),
unthinkable in the West, shows its centrality in the state system and the
esteem in which the process, and thus civil-service selection, was held.
And the exam had its very good sides: it objectivized and was much
better than nothing; it was a meritocratic test and thus potentially the
only way to counteract the nepotism that has always been seen as a
problem in China and that is, so to speak, a collateral of strong family
ties, which in turn is one of the deciding features of the Chinese context.
As Fukuyama says, ‘the natural human propensity to favour family and
friends – something I refer to as patrimonialism – constantly reasserts
itself in the absence of countervailing incentives’ (2011, p. 17; see Michels
1911, pp. 13–14). In China, this seems to be the case more than elsewhere –
today especially as compared to the West. The standard canon also means
that passing the exam was possible by everyone, at least in principle (meri-
tocracy is a Confucian virtue; Suleski 2008, p. 256); it contributed to the
state being perceived as an ‘us’ and not a ‘them’; in its objective continuity
and transparency, it communicated that the process and thus the state was
basically not corrupt; and last but not least, it meant that there was no
recruitment problem for the Chinese civil service, on which the country so
much depended.
If there had to be standard texts on which to base the exam, the neo-
Confucian Four Books was not the worst choice. The potentially quite
subversive nature of these texts in respect of any oppressive, irresponsible
regime is very clear even for the casual reader – especially in Mencius,
the second-generation Confucian who focused more than the Master on
‘the individual’s role in society’ (Suleski 2008, p. 259) and thus also in
governance and PA (see Gardner 2007 for a useful selection; regarding
Mencius, first of all Book 1B6, 1B8 [Mencius 2008, pp. 24, 26]; Suleski
2008, pp. 259–62).
This reflects, not coincidentally but precisely, the strong Chinese tradi-
tion, at the very core of Confucianism, that the ruler must deliver, that is
procure, at least peace and food for his people – if not, he does not have
the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (that is the significance of this concept) and can
be replaced, even legitimately killed (see MacGregor 2011, p. 151 for a
nutshell definition, and the Mencius references above). Further, ‘though
not commonly practiced, the Chinese, including many Confucians over
the centuries, have had the ideal that when the “son of heaven” breaks
a law, he should be punished in the same way as the common people’
(Tan 2011, p. 472). That the bureaucracy actually shared the power, in a

sense, of the emperor and the court (Cheung 2010, pp. 38–40), and that,
over time, ministerial councils established themselves and bureaucratized
decision-making (Bartlett 1991, esp. pp. 270–78) is neither surprising nor
specific – it is what one would expect in any PA context. ‘This was the
essence of Confucianism: . . . This moral system was institutionalized in
a complex bureaucracy whose internal rules strictly limited the degree to
which emperors, whose authority was theoretically unlimited, could act’
(Fukuyama 2012, p. 19).
Corruption, as was mentioned, has always been an issue in China, and
remains so (Osnos 2012 is a good example; see also Fukuyama 2012,
pp. 20–21); it is often seen as one of the main obstacles to effective party
rule and thus governance of China today. And while corruption is a
cultural–contextual phenomenon, the definition of which cannot be easily
transferred from one paradigm to another (cf. Urinboyev 2011; Wade
2013), and while, again, in China it is partially the dark side of close family
ties, corruption as such is by definition a problem, because it means that
things are not done as they should be done. But it is a problem that per-
meates all PA systems, and those we think of as historically particularly
non-corrupt – the Venetian Republic, Prussia around 1900 – had to pay
a price for it. The point in our context is that corruption in China is not
something that has just been noted from the outside; it has always been
recognized as an issue, and thus it is something that can be managed
and contained from the inside, both regarding equity and performance,
ethics and mechanics – the civil-service exam being the primary example.
Introducing a system that would just ‘outlaw’ family responsibility would
hardly be very promising.
In spite of all tradition and tradition-mindedness of which classical
China has so often been accused, not least by its own Young Turks, as
in all PA paradigms, PA reform is a red ribbon going through Chinese
history. Wang Anshi (1021–86), well known as one of the greatest states-
men of classical China and one of the leading neo-Confucians, with his
1058 Wan Yan Shu (Memorandum of a Myriad Words; 1935), is one of
the first public management authors in the modern sense, if not the first.
This is so because Wang addresses current concerns of the civil service
– selection, training, motivation, remuneration – often by presenting
solutions that are completely in line with today’s perspective, discussing
questions, inter alia of performance pay, benchmarking and managerial
trust. But this text is a PA reform programme, including large segments
criticizing the too impractical civil-service exam. Many of Wang’s changes
were implemented, many rolled back, as is usual in PA reform. For the
current general argument, it is especially important that he presents an
excellent corpus of neo-Confucian PA, mostly human resource manage-

ment, on a theoretically justified, empirically sound, and realistic, con-

textualized level that penetrates all three spheres of good PA mentioned
above (Drechsler 2013c).
But finally, how important is Confucianism in China today? Is it the key
to understanding the country or just folklore for ill-informed Westerners?
Is there even something we can call Confucianism, or are there so many
interpretations and hybrids that we cannot responsibly even use the label?
‘If one understands Confucianism as a broad stream of thought to which
numerous individuals have contributed by studying the writings associ-
ated with the tradition, thinking about Confucius’ teachings in relation to
important problems, and using them as a guide in life’ (Tan 2008b, p. 140),
then there certainly is. On a second level, ‘the significance of Confucius’s
teaching can perhaps be best seen in its unconscious manifestation in
Chinese society today’ (Jones 2008, p. xix); ‘for many, many Chinese, the
Confucianism they adhere to is an inarticulate Confucianism’ (Suleski
2008, p. 281).
The scope of Confucianism for current Chinese governance is perhaps
best symbolized by the Confucius statue in, or near, Tiananmen Square.
Facetiously speaking, sometimes it is there in front of the new museum,
sometimes inside in a courtyard; it depends which faction in the govern-
ment is exercising its will at the moment, and for some old-line commu-
nists, Confucius is still reactionary and even anathema (Siemons 2010,
2011; Fähnders 2011). The real Westernizers do not like him very much
either, and never did – Max Weber, the most important public admin-
istration scholar ever, belonged to those who blamed, and continue to
blame, China’s ‘backwardness’ on his ‘reactionary’ philosophy (1986,
pp. 430–58).
But importantly, there is a sufficiently cohesive ‘third’ intellectual move-
ment in China and also beyond, usually and best called new Confucianism
(to differentiate it from the millennium-old neo-Confucianism; like all
such movements, naturally, books about how cohesive it actually is
abound, or at least exist). New Confucianism emerged as a ‘conserva-
tive’ reaction to Chinese modernization in the early twentieth century
and moved to the Chinese diaspora after the communist takeover – Hong
Kong and Taiwan first of all; also, regarding theory, the USA; and,
because of its practice, later increasingly Singapore. It has been gaining
in importance in Mainland Chinese academe, society and certainly also in
governance, including politics during the last two decades, probably not
least because of the rapprochement with Taiwan and the re-inclusion of
Hong Kong. New Confucianism is the main intellectual worldview that
makes Confucianism applicable, and applies it to Chinese individual life,
society and state today, and it entails a response to the West, with the idea

that learning should go both ways (Tan 2008b, p. 142; generally, see 2008b,
esp. pp. 141–53, as an overall introduction; Bell 2010 is excellent as regards
governance). In that sense, it may be the most convincing alternative to the
‘consumerist patriotism’ (Zarrow 2008, p. 44; see Suleski 2008, pp. 270–71)
that is more or less the quasi-official line of Chinese development today.
As regards the aforementioned, allegedly untimely anti-creativity, anti-
economic aspect of Confucianism, as we have seen, the achievement of
bureaucracy in neo-Confucianism is inextricably linked with (economic)
performance, that is, output orientation, and that remains very strong
in Mainland China, certainly at the local level (Fukuyama 2012, p. 22),
maybe – as most non-Chinese China observers would probably argue –
even too strong.11 What new Confucianism, neo- Confucianism and
Confucianism (at least in the Mencian version) certainly (try to) create is
what Mahbubani has credited, in his comments on Fukuyama, the civil
service of Singapore with: it ‘has performed brilliantly . . . because it has
imbibed a culture which focuses the minds of civil servants on improving
the livelihood of Singaporeans’ (2013b; cf. Louie 2008, p. 13, on China).
Nonetheless, what can be said is that the relevance of Confucian gov-
ernance in Mainland China, as well as in all the Confucian countries
of Asia, is infinitely larger than that of Confucian PA as embodied by,
for instance, Wang Anshi. However, there is no reason for Confucian
PA not to be rediscovered and redeployed. A convincing narrative can
certainly be developed from a genuine basis, and from a practice that in
many respects is quite close to it – a living legacy, so to speak, that needs
only to rediscover its own theory. The dynamics of global as well as local
circumstances surely appear to point in this direction.
Islamic Public Administration or Ottoman Public Administration
Even more immediate in Europe, and that means towards the traditional
and maybe also future core of the West (see Kimmage 2013) is Islamic PA
and governance, because of both legacy and presence, although it is prima
facie less convincing an alternative than its Chinese or Confucian coun-
terpart. And yet, although a significant part of Europe shares an Islamic,
and that means Ottoman, PA legacy, studying the context and practice
of Islamic PA in this region is almost totally neglected. If it is mentioned,
then usually Islamic times and institutions, indeed the entire context, are
seen as obstacles to modern PA and to Europeanization, as stumbling
blocks on the way to good PA; usually, they are dismissed in a cavalier
footnote (Drechsler 2013b).
Ironically, for those who see a relevant topic here: as with Confucianism,
yet even more strongly, the first question raised is: is there such a thing

as Islamic PA; is it not already Orientalism to suggest that there might

be? Experts are split on this issue, and many good reasons argue against
describing as Islamic anything except Islam itself.12 We could bypass this
issue elegantly by addressing only Ottoman PA in the current context.
And yet, for our current concern, the third paradigm of PA and govern-
ance, and to show the uniqueness and specific quality of Islamic PA, to
first talk about Islam as such might do less harm than good because of
its larger scope and, if to a lesser extent, because of its applicability to the
non-Ottoman sphere.
One aspect that argues for Islamic PA as such is that the people in the
Islamic countries themselves would overwhelmingly say that Islam – Islam
as such, whatever their own tradition – matters, and that it matters very
much – often to the chagrin of Western observers who want to bring
Western- style democracy to these countries and then note that elec-
tion victories go to Islamic parties, not to people who think as they do
(cf. Lerch 2012; Bauer 2011, pp. 401–4). The hypothesis would thus be that
Islam – being such a strong determinant of context, of the world in which
people live and of the systems that they build there and that emerge – has
had, and still has, a non-incidental, important and actually crucial impact
on how the public sphere is organized and managed. Thus one of the most
important variables for PA – not just governance – in Islamic countries
would probably be Islam, not just the national tradition, even (albeit less
so) if the society in question is quite secular.
Regarding the substance of Islamic PA and governance, there is cer-
tainly a large traditional and still viable literature on the governance
aspect. For instance, Nizām al-Mulk (1018–92) and his Siyāsatnāma (The
Book of Government) (1960) present us with a specific, workable concept
of state administration that may be as different from the usual Western
recommendations for improving the governance of the Central Asian and
Middle Eastern countries as it may be superior in realism and applicabil-
ity. One important example regarding both equity and performance is
the strong emphasis on the absolute non-delegatability of responsibility
for those over whom one rules (1960, II, IV, VI). This was seen as a key
feature also of Islamic PA, even in the West, for many centuries, although
today it is generally forgotten (cf. Hebel in Stolleis 2003, pp. 81–5). Its
importance today lies in creating direct responsibility of the ruler for his
subjects, crucial for him and his record, and for how he will be judged.
The idea is the same as in Confucianism: ‘an ethical doctrine designed to
moderate the behaviour of rulers and orient them towards the interest of
the ruled’ (Fukuyama 2012, p. 19).
For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will now focus specifically
on the Ottoman Empire, although this is a somewhat historical i nstitution.

But only somewhat: even beyond the current search for potentiality,
Ottoman PA as Islamic PA is a central PA narrative that is about history,
but not in itself historical at all (cf. Sindbaeck and Hartmuth 2011). And
there are many good reasons for this: because of its centrality for much
of what is now a Western region (CEE), especially in its Western Muslim
part, but also in the countries it formerly fought and often conquered,
such as Hungary or Romania; because of its sophistication in PA and
public policy, especially on the practical level; because its successor,
modern Turkey, is again becoming, or actually has become, the power-
house in the former Imperial region (see Aras 2012) and is to a large extent
the main carrier country of Islamic PA; because of the centuries-long, at
best questionable, track record of Westernization as well as Western inter-
ventionism in the region and in Turkey itself (see Schulz 2011, esp. p. 487);
and also because today’s radical Islamicism is to a large extent based
on a fundamentalist movement against the Ottomans (see Kadri 2011,
pp. 123–5; Finkel 2007, pp. 411–12; for the opposite of a radical Islamic
theology, see Khorchide 2012).
Especially in the last decade or two, the Ottoman Empire has been
reassessed by historians and sociologists as ‘not so bad’ in many ways,
quite contrary to the clichés that various legacies – self-interested, more
often than not – have so far promulgated (see, e.g., Finkel 2007). And these
reassessments have occasionally included governance (see, e.g., Barkey
2008; Hanioğlu 2008). To use Weber’s words, ironically enough, the
Sultan’s rule was not ‘sultanistic’, a form of rule that is ‘nicht sachlich ratio-
nalisiert, sondern es ist in ihr nur die Sphäre der freien Willkür und Gnade ins
Extrem entwickelt’ (not objectively rationalized, but the sphere of arbitrari-
ness and grace is developed here to an extreme) (Weber 1922, p. 134; and
see pp. 133–4; Chehabi and Linz 1998, pp. 4–7). In addition, shifts in how
we see governance and PA generally have also contributed to new pos-
sibilities in assessing Osmanian rule and administration. Merilee Grindle’s
concept of ‘good enough governance’ (2004, 2007; see de Vries 2013a for a
PA perspective) is one of the most important ones in this context, underlin-
ing that, very often, governance is about achieving minimal workability of
a system against the odds of heavy policy constraints.
Like its Chinese counterpart, Ottoman PA was constantly under
reform, too – perennially modernizing at least since the late eighteenth
century (see Findley 1980; Heper 2001, esp. pp. 1021–2) – and perhaps
the ideal case study for such an effort under such circumstances. The key
Westernizing variant of this modernization effort, known as the Tanzimat
reforms or the Tanzimat era (1839–76), was, however, also a reaction to
Western pressure, which partially contributed to its illegitimacy in the
eyes of many citizens (Ansary 2009, pp. 285–8). Thus to see the successor

paradigm, Hamidism (1876–1908), the governance reforms and reactions

to exterior and interior pressure by the last powerful sultan, Abdülhamid
II, as a less Western but more contextual form of modernization (see
Hanioğlu 2008, pp. 123–9; Finkel 2007, pp. 488–501) is one of the more
recent and controversial trends in Ottoman governance re-evaluation and,
I think, very likely correct (to be ‘controversial’, after all, is a good thing).
(Examples include the refocus on the sultan’s role as caliph, the dexterous
use of media and communication technology, the emphasis on personal
loyalty and the purposeful creation of the ideology of Ottomanism; see
Haslip 1973 [1958]; and, generally, Reinkowski 2005, pp. 14–29).
These newly apparent aspects of the Ottoman Empire, however, have
not yet made it into PA history, let alone PA studies generally. To the con-
trary: basically, as mentioned earlier, the Ottoman and thus Islamic legacy
is always seen as bad, because the fight against the Ottomans is an – often
the central – identity-creating myth of many CEE countries. Differences in
administrative and life quality are still accounted for today by saying that
one part was Western and the other Turkish (cf. Sindbaeck and Hartmuth
2011, pp. 1, 5).
In addition, Islamic–Ottoman PA shares with Confucian–Chinese PA
two crucial features for re-evaluation today, one for and one against: its
promotion primarily via the economic success of the main carrier country;
and its less than complete enthusiasm for this legacy by the elites in that
country. Among the three main intellectually significant Turkish political
groupings, extreme Westernizers, Kemalite modernizers and AKP follow-
ers, praise of the governance aspects of the Ottoman Empire, let alone of
Hamidism, usually meets with incredulity at best. And, while there are
some tendencies to a re-evaluation of Ottoman history as such among the
latter group (cf. briefly Bilefsky 2012; Reinkowski 2011), current Turkish
PA and PA reform is not Ottoman at all – structurally, it is basically still
Kemalite with the AKP reform efforts on top, to the extent that they are
geared towards modernization (whether in the sense of ‘reactionary mod-
ernism’ or not), following old-fashioned NPM tenets (see Filkins 2012,
esp. p. 43; Tuğal 2009, pp. 55–6; Sezen 2011, esp. p. 339).13
Principally, however, Turkey is an example of the ‘three paradigms’
model in practice. In spite of the 2013 crackdowns on the Taksim Square/
Gezi Park demonstrations against the Erdoğan-AKP government, seen
as undemocratic and un-Western by many observers from the West and
beyond, although the prime minister, while losing popularity, was seen as
potentially winning re-election should there be an election at that stage
(cf., e.g., New York Times 2013; Peter 2013), Istanbul remains the largest,
most dynamic and most innovative city in Europe. Indeed, it is one of the
three largest municipalities in the world (a fact rarely realized in the West),

and the Turkish economic miracle only occurred after post- Ottoman
Kemalism was realigned with Islam (see Lerch 2012; Gülen 2012; Tuğal
2009). The Islamic–Ottoman case is weaker than the Confucian-Chinese
one, however, because, first, Turkey is not as directly the successor of
the Ottoman Empire as today’s China is of Confucianism, and, second,
beyond folklore and imagery, there is very little of a serious, intellectual
‘new Ottoman’ m ovement in Turkey and among Turks as compared to
new Confucianism.
So why would this case be important? The reassessment of the Ottoman
Empire is an ideal case study of the potential policy relevance of what
looks like merely a shift in academic conceptualization. Once we appreci-
ate that Constantinople had and has a legacy in the governance and PA of
CEE that may be different from others, but not necessarily worse, this may
eventually give the Muslim-majority Balkan countries a freer hand to deal
with the possibilities of PA development towards genuine modernization.
In her excellent case study of Albania, Cecilie Endresen has shown how a
positive Ottoman discourse can and does legitimize even global-Western-
style progress (2011, pp. 48–50).
Of course, such a way of thinking comes with costs. For Europe and
PA, it goes against the principles of the European administrative space; it
goes against the mind-set that still, even from a liberal and not just from a
right-wing perspective, defines Europe as ‘non-Turkey’ (see Böckenförde
2011). It is clear that the Turkish government’s handling of the Taksim
Square demonstrations has brought this sentiment to the forefront of
the European juste milieu once again, to the point of wanting to exclude
Turkey from the Europe of the EU (see, e.g., Bilefsky 2013; Martens
2013). And that is the general tradition, of course: not only CEE, but
also Europe as such is historically often defined by the struggle against
the Turks, and against Islam generally, and this ‘othering’ continues
with a vengeance. The Ottomans are still the ‘quintessentially other’, and
Muslims, it sometimes seems, as well – not only in Europe, but in the
West generally, especially in the last decade or so, from 9/11 to the Boston
Marathon bombings of 2013.
There is one ironic yet profound effect, however, of defining Europe,
and by extension the West, by excluding and contrasting it with Turkey,
the Ottoman Empire and Islam: if this is so, then surely it is much more
likely that there is indeed something like non-Western and something we
can call Islamic PA, because there must then be something specifically
Western, rather than global, in our current system. And that, in turn, does
much to confirm the three paradigms thesis, and thus the feasibility of
NWPA.

WHAT IS WESTERN?
To sum up, the question here is: do we arrive more easily at good, meaning
effective, PA if we realize that there are different contexts and thus, poten-
tially at least, different ways to it; indeed, are there legitimately different
goals? If we condemn certain places, as is so often the case, for not living
up to the standards of globalized–Western PA, is this necessarily the
problem of the countries in question, or might it also be the problem of
asking the wrong questions and setting the wrong targets? This is where the
debate on goals (point C above) comes in, and it is a hard one inasmuch as
telling non-Western nations that freedom and democracy, Western-style,
are not for them because they have their own traditions may be as wrong,
and indeed as post-colonialist, as trying to impose Western values, by
calling them human, global or universal, on others. This is a debate that is
nowhere near resolved.
However, it is easier to discuss this matter in PA, ironically because,
here, the debate basically does not happen – in PA, as I have pointed out,
the discussion begins and ends with an unjustified, tacit, implicit assump-
tion in favour of the global-Western solution, and that, again, works only
as long as this solution is clearly superior, both in ethics and in perfor-
mance. Yet, even if this were the case, this should give PA scholarship
reason for doubt, this being the nature of scholarship; but right now, when
dusk seems to settle (perhaps for real, perhaps just due to some temporary
darkness), the Owl of Minerva may again spread her wings more easily.
What the current situation implies is that simple assumptions, intellectu-
ally and policy-wise, are clearly no longer good enough. The Confucian
challenge to the global-Western model, to seek ‘harmony over freedom,
consensus over choice, intimacy over integrity, and communitarianism
over individualism’ (Jones 2008, p. ix), is a choice that can and may be
contested. But can it still be cavalierly dismissed, especially when those
who do the dismissing are really no longer cavaliers, or indeed, if the age
of cavaliers is coming to an end?
This is all the more important if we look at the context of development.
The Western countries were, until very recently, undoubtedly more suc-
cessful, which means that the non-Western ones were, and to a great extent
still are, less successful and, thus, in need of development. The fact that
administrative capacity, institutionally as well as personally, is a conditio
sine qua non for development is clear (Nurkse 1952, 1964; see Drechsler
2009a). That too many developing countries do not have it, yet need it –
indeed that this could even define ‘developing’ (whatever that means) – is
likewise obvious (cf. http://www.unpan.org/, if only for the problem,
not necessarily for the remedy). This changed for the reasons mentioned

above, especially in the context of the emergence of the non-Western

‘tigers’ and the re-entry into the West, even into the EU, of some countries
that one would have to call ‘developing’ by several criteria. In addition,
these days many of us see that
problems of implementation are at the root of poor economic and social out-
comes all over the world. Governments routinely fail to deliver basic services
like education, health, security, macroeconomic stability, or fail to deliver them
in a timely, impartial, and cost-effective manner. This is as true of the United
States as of any developing country. (Fukuyama 2013b; see also Mahbubani
2013b)
Now, one could interpret it either way: developing countries do not have
sufficient administrative capacity and thus need to be motivated or forced to
move towards global-Western public administration, or – either for now or
in general – developing countries, seeing that this ostensibly does not work
(in many places at least) or that it may not even be necessary or desirable,
need to develop optimal capacity according to their own governance system
and general context. And what speaks for the latter, even if one believes
in common goals, is that the track record of Westernization, especially of
Islamic countries, and societies, in PA and otherwise, has not exactly been
universally excellent. As pointed out above, in PA today, this is even more
the case because the goals of good global-Western PA are moving as well.
But even if we pursue global-Western values, should we not at least
look into whether they are perhaps global but not exclusively Western,
and whether they could not just be promulgated in a way that is easier to
swallow than Western triumphalism, especially as the present makes the
latter sound quite hollow (cf. Steiner et al. 2007, pp. 517–40; Maier 1997,
pp. 48–50)? In other words, should we not ask whether different narratives
are possible, even if we believe in common goals and even some common
best practices?
And yet, in the end, we will always return to the question: is it not
a betrayal of humankind, especially of that outside the West, to even
question the universality of ethical goals, and of all the great Western
accomplishments such as ‘separation of power, sovereignty of the people,
representative democracy’ (Winkler 2011; cf. Diamond 2013)? Is it true
that part of the Western legacy is to absolutize oneself and proclaim
the universality of one’s achievements? As we have seen, and as can be
observed daily, in too many places this leads to inverted, paradoxical
results; there is more than just a whiff of post-colonialism in this position;
and to question oneself is not only, but decidedly, Western, as is trying to
understand the other, at least as an initial move.
To allow different places and different narratives is, I think, in the end

more Western than not to do so. And whatever the possible outcome of
the general debate, in PA this debate is generally not even taking place.
Therefore, regarding international PA, following the governance dis-
course, the truly Western position right now, and the heuristically best
position for non-Western stakeholders as well, is to question the ortho-
doxy that global 5 Western 5 good, and to discuss what the NWPA alter-
natives, regarding both goals and performance, are or could be – in other
words, whether one can progress towards the good at least via different
paths and perhaps even with different goals, rather than via one way to
one destination only.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This chapter develops Drechsler (2013a), and thus many passages have
been incorporated. For friendly review of the current version, I thank
Rainer Kattel, Olga Mikheeva and Ingbert Edenhofer.
NOTES
1. By ‘West’ and ‘Western’, I mean Europe, North America, and Australia and New
Zealand, with its Greco-Christian-Enlightenment-Scientism legacy plus both produc-
tion and consumer capitalism.
2. Lebenswelt, ‘life-world’, in the sense of the existence of the human person in a phenom-
enological, Continental-idealist or semiotic sense, is ‘the sum of non-inheritable infor-
mation’ (Lotman 1971, p. 167) in which individual persons, and by extension groups
of persons, live by their own, however evolving and latent, self-definition, and through
which they operate – what defines people is what they let define them. According to
Nicolai Hartmann (who talks about Geist, which arguably is the manifestation of
context), ‘Nobody invents his own language, creates his own science; the individual,
rather, grows into what is existing, he takes it over from the common sphere, which
offers it to him’ (1949, p. 460; for a general philosophical discussion of this question, see
Drechsler 1997, pp. 67–9).
3. That the most serious external challenges to the view that universal human rights are at
least to some extent a Western construct, legacy or view (Kühnhardt 1987, p. 301: ‘The
human rights topos in the sense of inviolable and innate human rights is not part of the
inventory of the history of ideas of non-Western political thinking’) comes mainly from
Chinese and Islamic sides is prima facie hardly grounds for dismissal.
4. But see also Raadschelders (2013, p. 218); on Governance, see Drechsler 2004; and criti-
cally about this discussion, Hajnal and Pál 2013.
5. Fukuyama discusses ‘procedural measures, input measures, output measures, and
measures of bureaucratic autonomy’ (2013a, p. 5; see pp. 5–13 for the discussion), sug-
gesting, partially, for reasons of measurability, as a result an optimal combination of
autonomy and quality of governance (5 administrative capacity) (pp. 11–16).
6. Cf. however Fukuyama (2012, p. 24), where he states that the connection between
democracy and bureaucratic quality (in this case, in East Asia) has not yet been
sufficiently studied.

7. The usual contenders would be Russian/Soviet, Hispanic/Latin, Indian or Japanese PA

(see also Painter and Peters 2010, pp. 19–30). Even though this will not be acceptable to
all readers, I will suggest that the first three are basically Western; the last is partially
Chinese, partially Western.
8. Going beyond these, see Painter and Peters (2010, pp. 3–16, 237); Yesilkagit (2010),
with a very nice heuristic distinction between legacy ideas and legacy structures.
9. A parallel is the European countries, which some ten or 15 years ago were still judged
according to how close they were ‘already’ to the New Public Management (NPM)
(a good example is Bossaert and Demmke 2003), but which, according to Pollitt and
Bouckaert (2004), did not follow the NPM at all but rather their own, perhaps even
(and in my opinion certainly) better, model, that of the Neo-Weberian state (NWS) (see
ibid., pp. 99–100). Observing this phenomenon gave rise to the concept of the NWS to
begin with, which later partially transformed from an empirical to a normative model
(see Drechsler and Kattel 2009).
10. Public Administration Review (2010), in spite of much sophistication of some of the
contributions, and recently Gulrajani and Moloney (2012), basically make this point,
both for science and for policy; the latter also provides a handy summary of the theory
and practice of comparative ‘third-world’ PA scholarship during the last few decades
from an Anglo-American mainstream perspective.
11. It is interesting that Fukuyama dismisses output measures because they are complex
and difficult to measure (2013, pp. 8–9); however, this is valid only for (precisely, ‘sci-
entific’) measurement, not for the criterion as such. Therefore, though coming from
another perspective, Christopher Pollitt has pointed out ‘the magnitude of the loss if
one abandons any attempts to measure the impact of government actions and settles for
just input and process matters’ (2013).
12. For example, Thomas Bauer has recently attacked this position with verve as an
‘Islamicization of Islam’, as pretty much the root, and a primary tool, of all evil in mis-
understanding both Islam and the countries where this is the predominant faith (2011,
esp. pp. 192–223).
13. Even Arab PA, that is, PA as practised and discussed in the countries of the Arabian
peninsula, where much of the funding to promote Islam globally comes from and
which, partly for this reason, and partly because it is the place of origin and thus the
original context of Islam, dominates both Islamic discourse and the perception of Islam
in the West, is largely Westernized today, as opposed to the culture and governance
discourse. For a recent snapshot, see the programme and abstracts of the IIAS-IASIA
joint congress in Bahrain in June 2013, http://iias-iasia-congress2013.org/.
REFERENCES
Note: Pure web-based information is not repeated here; all websites are valid as of 1 July
2013.
Andrews, M. (2013), The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: Changing Rules for
Realistic Solutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ansary, T. (2009), Destiny Disrupted: A History of the Islamic World through Islamic Eyes,
New York: Public Affairs.
Aras, B. (2012), ‘Turkey and the Balkans: new policy in a changing regional environment’,
German Marshall Fund on Turkey Analysis, 31 October.
Barkey, K. (2008), Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective,
Bartlett, B.S. (1991), Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch’ing China,
1723–1820, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bauer, T. (2011), Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islam, Berlin: Verlag
der Weltreligionen/Insel.

Bell, D.A. (2010), China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing
Society, 4th edn, Princeton, NJ etc.: Princeton University Press.
Bell, D.A. (2011), ‘Singapore: the city of nation building’, in D.A. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds),
The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, pp. 78–110.
Berliner, N. with Mark C. Elliott and Liu Chang, Yuan Hongqi, and Henry Tzu Ng (eds)
(2010), The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, New Haven,
CT and London: Peabody Essex Museum/Yale University Press.
Berman, E.M. (2010), ‘Public Administration in East Asia: Common Roots, Ways and
Tasks’, in E.M. Berman, M. Jae Moon and Heungsuk Choi (eds), Public Administration
in East Asia: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press,
pp. 2–32.
Bilefsky, D. (2012), ‘As if the Ottoman period never ended’, The New York Times, 29
October.
Bilefsky, D. (2013), ‘A potential casualty of Turkey’s crackdown: European Union member-
ship’, The New York Times, 13 June.
Böckenförde, W. (2011), ‘Europa und die Türkei [2005]’, in Wissenschaft, Politik,
Verfassungsgericht, Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp. 281–98.
Bossaert, D. and C. Demmke (2003), Civil Service in the Accession States: New Trends and the
Impact of the Integration Process, Maastricht: EIPA.
Boyer, R. (1994), ‘The convergence thesis revisited: globalization but still the century of
nations?’, in S. Berger and R. Dore (eds), National Diversity and Global Capitalism, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 29–59.
Buruma, I. and A. Margalit (2004), Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism,
London: Atlantic Books.
Chehabi, H.E. and J.J. Linz (1998), ‘A theory of sultanism 1: a type of nondemocratic rule’,
in H.E. Chehabi and J.J. Linz (eds), Sultanistic Regimes, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Cheung, A.B.L. (2010), ‘Checks and balances in China’s administrative traditions: a prelimi-
nary assessment’, in M. Painter and B.G. Peters (eds), Tradition and Public Administration,
Christensen, T. and P. Lægreid (2013), ‘Performance and accountability – a theoretical dis-
cussion and an empirical assessment’, Uni Rokkan Centre Working Paper 3/2013.
Christensen, T. Lisheng Dong, Martin Painter and Richard M. Walker (2012), ‘Imitating the
West? Evidence on administrative reform from the upper echelons of Chinese provincial
government’, Public Administration Review, 72 (6), 798–806.
De Vries, Michiel (2013a), ‘The challenge of good governance’, The Innovation Journal: The
Public Sector Innovation Journal, 18 (1).
De Vries, Michiel (2013b), ‘Out of the box: CEE and CA transitions and PA paradigms’,
in M. Vintar, Allan Rosenbaum, György Jenei and Wolfgang Drechsler (eds), The Past,
Present and Future of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe: Twenty Years
of NISPAcee, 1992–2012, Bratislava: NISPAcee Press, pp. 108–24.
Diamond, L. (2013), ‘Why wait for democracy?’, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter.
Drechsler, W. (1997), ‘On German Geist’, Trames, 1 (2), 65–77.
Drechsler, W. (2004), ‘Governance, good governance, and government: the case for Estonian
administrative capacity’, Trames, 8 (4), 388–96.
Drechsler, W. (2009a), ‘Towards the law & economics of development: Ragnar Nurkse
(1907–1959)’, European Journal of Law and Economics, 28 (1), 19–37.
Drechsler, W. (2009b), ‘The rise and demise of the New Public Management: lessons and
opportunities for South East Europe’, Uprava – Administration, 7 (3), 7–27.
Drechsler, W. (2009c), ‘Towards a neo-Weberian European Union? Lisbon Agenda and
public administration’, Halduskultuur – Administrative Culture, 10, 6–21.
Drechsler, W. (2011), ‘Public administration in times of crisis’, in R. Kattel, Witold
Mikulowski and B. Guy Peters (eds), Public Administration in Times of Crisis, Bratislava:
NISPAcee Press, pp. 15–25.

Drechsler, W. (2013a), ‘Three paradigms of governance and administration: Chinese,

Western, and Islamic’, Society and Economy, 35 (3), 319–42.
Drechsler, W. (2013b), ‘“Islamic” public administration: the missing dimension in NISPAcee
public administration research?’, in M. Vintar, Allan Rosenbaum, György Jenei and
Wolfgang Drechsler (eds), The Past, Present and Future of Public Administration in Central
and Eastern Europe: Twenty Years of NISPAcee, 1992–2012, Bratislava: NISPAcee Press,
pp. 57–76.
Drechsler, W. (2013c), ‘Wang Anshi and the origins of modern public management in Song
Dynasty China’, Public Money and Management, 33 (5), 353–60.
Drechsler, W. and R. Kattel (2009), ‘Conclusion: towards the neo-Weberian state? Perhaps,
but certainly adieu, NPM!’, The NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy,
1 (2), 95–9.
Elliott, M. (2009), Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World, New York:
Longman.
Elman, B.A. (2000), A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Endresen, C. (2011), ‘Diverging images of Ottoman legacy in Albania’, in T. Sindbaeck
and M. Hartmuth (eds), Images of Imperial Legacy: Modern Discourse on the Social
and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeast Europe, Münster: Lit,
pp. 37–51.
Fähnders, T. (2011), ‘Welcher Konfuzius darf es sein?’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1
April.
Filkins, D. (2012), ‘The deep state. The prime minister is revered as a moderate, but how far
will he go to stay in power?’, The New Yorker, 12 March, 38–49.
Findley, C.V. (1980), Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte,
1789–1922, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Finkel, C. (2007), Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923, New York:
Basic Books.
Fukuyama, F. (2011), The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French
Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Fukuyama, F. (2012), ‘The patterns of history’, Journal of Democracy, 23 (1), 14–26.
Fukuyama, F. (2013a), ‘What is governance?’, Center for Global Development Working
Paper 314, January. Also in Governance, 26 (3), 347–68.
Fukuyama, F. (2013b), ‘Fukuyama replies’, The GOVERNANCE blog, available at http://
governancejournal.net.
Gardner, D.K. (ed.) (2007), The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian
Tradition, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Grindle, M.S. (2004), ‘Good enough governance: poverty reduction and reform in develop-
ing countries’, Governance, 17 (4), 525–48.
Grindle, M.S. (2007), ‘Good enough governance revisited’, Development Policy Review,
25 (5), 533–74.
Gülen, F. (2012), ‘Islam und Moderne stehen nicht im Widerspruch’, interview with
R. Hermann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 December.
Gulrajani, N. and K. Moloney (2012), ‘Globalizing public administration: today’s research
and tomorrow’s agenda’, Public Administration Review, 72 (1), 78–86.
Hajnal, G. and G. Pál (2013), ‘Some reflections on the Hungarian discourse on (good) gov-
ernance’, MTA TK Politikatudományi Intézet Working Papers in Political Science 2013/3.
Han, B.-C. (2012), Transparenzgesellschaft, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Hanioğlu, M.Ş. (2008), A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Hartmann, N. (1949), ‘Nikolai Hartmann’, in Philosophen-Lexikon: Handwörterbuch der
Philosophie nach Personen, 1, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 454–71.
Haslip, J. (1973 [1958]), The Sultan: The Life of Abdul Hamid II, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
Heath, P. (ed.) (1974), The Philosopher’s Alice, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Heper, M. (2001), ‘The state and bureaucracy: the Turkish case in historical perspective’, in
A. Farazmand (ed.), Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration,
2nd edn, New York: Dekker, pp. 1019–28.
Jacques, M. (2011), ‘How China will change the way we think: the case of the state’,
TransAtlantic Academy Paper Series, February.
Jan, C.-Y. (2010), ‘History and context of public administration in Taiwan’, in E.M. Berman,
M. Jae Moon and Heungsuk Choi (eds), Public Administration in East Asia: Mainland
China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 497–516.
Jones, D. (ed.) (2008), Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, Chicago
and La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Kadri, S. (2011), Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law, London: Bodley
Head.
Khorchide, M. (2012), Islam ist Barmherzigkeit: Grundzüge einer modernen Religion,
Freiburg: Herder.
Kimmage, M. (2013), ‘The decline of the West: an American story’, Transatlantic Academy
Paper Series 2012–2013, 4.
Kühnhardt, L. (1987), Die Universalität der Menschenrechte, Bonn: BzfpB.
Lerch, W.G. (2012), ‘Die Wende’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 July.
Lord, Carnes (2003), The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now, New Haven, CT
and London: Yale University Press.
Lotman, J.M. (1971), ‘Problema “obushenya kulture” kak yeo tipologisheskaya harakteris-
tika’, Semeiotiké, 5, 167–76.
Louie, K. (ed.) (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, Cambridge:
MacGregor, N. (2011), A History of the World in 100 Objects, London: Allen Lane.
Mahbubani, K. (2013a), The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World,
New York: Public Affairs.
Mahbubani, K. (2013b), ‘Reply to Fukuyama 2013a’, The GOVERNANCE blog, available
at http://governancejournal.net.
Maier, H. (1997), Wie universal sind die Menschenrechte? Freiburg: Herder.
Martens, M. (2013), ‘Erdogans Kettenhund’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 June.
Mencius (2008), Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries. B.W. Van Norden
(tr. and ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Michels, R. (1911), Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der Modernen Demokratie:
Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens, Leipzig:
Klinkhardt.
Miyazaki, I. (1981), China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial
China, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
New York Times (2013), ‘Turkey in Turmoil’ (editorial), 19 June.
Nizām al-Mulk (1960), The Book of Government or Rules for Kings. Syiāsát-nāma or Siyar
al-Mulk. H. Drake (trans.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Nurkse, R. (1952), ‘Trade fluctuations and buffer policies of low-income countries’, Kyklos
12 (3), 141–54; Epilogue: 244–65.
Nurkse, R. (1964 [1953]), Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries, 9th
impr., Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Osnos, E. (2012), ‘Boss Rail: the disaster that exposed the underside of the boom’, The New
Yorker, 22 October.
Painter, M. and B.G. Peters (eds) (2010), Tradition and Public Administration, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Peter, Tom A. (2013), ‘Poll shows Erdogan’s popularity has taken a hit: could he lose his
mandate?’, The Christian Science Monitor, 18 June.
Pollitt, C. (2013), ‘Reply to Fukuyama 2013a’, The GOVERNANCE blog, available at
http://governancejournal.net.
Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert (2004), Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis,
2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert (2011), Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis:

New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State, 3rd edn, Oxford:
Public Administration Review (2010), eds R. O’Leary and D.M. Van Slyke, Special Issue on
the Future of Public Administration in 2020, 70 (Supplement s1).
Raadschelders, J.C.N. (2013), Public Administration: The Interdisciplinary Study of
Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Randma-Liiv, T. and R. Kruusenberg (2012), ‘Policy transfer in immature policy environ-
ments: motives, scope, role models and agents’, Public Administration and Development,
32 (2), 154–66.
Reinkowski, M. (2005), Die Dinge der Ordnung: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die
osmanische Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert, München: Oldenbourg.
Reinkowski, M. (2011), ‘The Ottoman Empire and South Eastern Europe from a Turkish
perspective’, in T. Sindbaeck and M. Hartmuth (eds), Images of Imperial Legacy: Modern
Discourse on the Social and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeast
Europe, Münster: Lit, pp. 21–36.
Rothstein, B. (2013), ‘Reply to Fukuyama 2013a’, The GOVERNANCE blog, available at
http://governancejournal.net.
Schulz, O. (2011), Ein Sieg der zivilisierten Welt? Die Intervention der europäischen Großmächte
im griechischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg (1826–1832), Münster: Lit.
Sezen, S. (2011), ‘International versus domestic explanations of administrative reforms: the
case of Turkey’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 77 (2), 322–46.
Siemons, M. (2010), ‘China und der Konfuzianismus: Kotau mit Krawatte’, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 November.
Siemons, M. (2011), ‘Zum Denken bitte in den Hinterhof’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
26 April.
Sindbaeck, T. and M. Hartmuth (eds) (2011), Images of Imperial Legacy: Modern Discourse
on the Social and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeast Europe,
Münster: Lit.
Steiner, H.J., Philip Alston and Ryan Goodman (2007), International Human Rights in
Context, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stolleis, M. (2003), Der menschenfreundliche Ton: Zwei Dutzend Geschichten von Johann
Peter Hebel mit kleinem Kommentar, Frankfurt/Main: Insel.
Suleski, R. (2008), ‘Confucius: the organization of Chinese society’, in D. Jones (ed.),
Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, Chicago and La Salle, IL:
Open Court, pp. 253–90.
Tan, S.-h. (2008a), ‘Three corners for one: tradition and creativity in the Analects’, in
D. Jones (ed.), Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, Chicago and
La Salle, IL: Open Court, pp. 59–77.
Tan, S.-h. (2008b), ‘Modernizing Confucianism and “new Confucianism”’, in K. Louie (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 135–54.
Tan, S.-h. (2011), ‘The Dao of politics: li (rituals/rites) and laws as pragmatic tools of govern-
ment’, Philosophy East and West, 61 (3), 468–91.
Tuğal, C. (2009), Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Urinboyev, R. (2011), ‘Law, social norms and welfare as means of public administration: case
study of Mahalla institutions in Uzbekistan’, NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration
and Policy, 4 (1), 33–57.
Wade, R.H. (2013), ‘Poverty, corruption, and the changing world, 1950–2050’, Triple
Crisis blog, 17 June, available at http://triplecrisis.com/poverty- corruption- and-
the-
changing-world-1950–2050/.
Wang Anshi (1935), The Wan Yen Shu, or Memorial of a Myriad Words [1058], in
H.R. Williamson, Wang An Shih: A Chinese Statesman and Educationalist of the Sung
Dynasty 1, London: Probsthain, pp. 48–84.

Weber, M. (1922), Grundriß der Sozialökonomik 3: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen:

Mohr Siebeck.
Weber, M. (1986), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie 1, 8th edn, Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck.
Winkler, H.A. (2011), ‘Wo fängt der Westen an, wo hört der Osten auf?’, interview with
C. Seidl, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 December.
Yesilkagit, K. (2010), ‘The future of administrative tradition: tradition as ideas and
structure’, in M. Painter and B.G. Peters (eds), Tradition and Public Administration,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 145–57.
Zarrow, P. (2008), ‘Social and political developments: the making of the twentieth-century
Chinese state’, in in K. Louie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 20–45.

PART II
INTERNATIONAL
PERSPECTIVES
OF PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION, NEW
PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
AND GOVERNANCE

6. Public service reform in South Africa:
from apartheid to new public
management
Robert Cameron
INTRODUCTION
Public service reform in South Africa has entailed the transition from
an apartheid-based, public service to a more democratic administration.
The major challenge was to move from a state that provided services pre-
dominantly to a small white constituency to one that also provided decent
services to the disadvantaged black majority. The post-apartheid state is
pursuing the provision of services to all its constituents, thus increasing its
target group from approximately 4 million to 50 million.
The public service was not only apartheid based; it was also outdated
by international standards. Sanctions and boycotts had contributed to an
isolated public service that in some respects was run on scientific manage-
ment lines. The new South African government introduced new public
management (NPM) reforms in order to modernize the public service,
although there has been some debate about how extensively they have
been implemented (Cameron, 2009).
This chapter plans to examine the three main components of NPM that
were adopted in South Africa. First, there is administrative decentraliza-
tion (or delegation), which aimed to give line managers greater manage-
rial authority and responsibility. The second component of NPM that
is of relevance is performance management. If managers are to be given
greater autonomy, they need to be held accountable through performance
standards. Explicit standards and measures of performance require goals
to be defined and performance targets to be met. This can take the form
of using performance indicators and setting targets. The third element is
that of corporatization. This involves breaking up central government
departments into corporatized units around services that can then deal
with each other on an arm’s-length basis. There is a split between a small
strategic policy core and large operational arms of government, which
have increased managerial autonomy to promote efficient service delivery
(Hood, 1991).
This chapter examines how deeply NPM reforms have entrenched
135

themselves into the South African public service. This case study will be
examined in terms of a comparative, developing-country lens.
NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

In the 1980s, the traditional bureaucratic public administration model of
Max Weber was challenged in anglophone countries such as the United
Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. A new model of public sector
management emerged in these countries called new public management
(NPM). It involved the use of private management ideas, such as greater
autonomy and flexibility for managers, contract appointments, perfor-
mance management and new financial techniques. NPM was seen as a way
of cutting through the red tape and rigidity associated with old-style public
administration and providing more efficient service delivery (Hood, 1991;
Pollitt, 1993; Minogue, 1998; Hughes, 2003).
The evidence on the success of NPM in developed countries is sparse
and indifferent. Frederickson and Smith (2003: 14), in an overview of
NPM literature, state that the application of these principles can result in
selective and short-term increases in efficiency; is negatively related with
fairness, equity and justice; seldom reduces costs; and has produced inno-
vative ways to accomplish public purposes. McCourt (2001: 113) points
out that it is difficult to demonstrate that the much-touted NPM service
delivery reforms have led to significant improvements, although there is
sufficient negative evidence to refute some of the more extravagant claims.
A recent study has thrown doubt on the applicability of NPM, even in
its OECD heartland. Meier and O’Toole (2008), in a study of Texas school
data sets, found that there is weak support for many of the nostrums of
public management; for example, contracting out is less about efficiency
and more about dumping problems. The evidence-based conclusion of this
study led the authors to term their article ‘The proverbs of public manage-
ment’, which is of course a new take on the title of Herbert Simon’s clas-
sical critique of scientific public administration (Simon, 1952). Thus the
question remains: how transferable and suitable is NPM to developing
countries?
TRANSFERABILITY OF NPM TO DEVELOPING

COUNTRIES
NPM reforms have spread through many developing countries, includ-

ing much of anglophone Africa. The suitability of such NPM reforms

Public service reform in South Africa 137
for developing countries is a matter of conjecture. McCourt (2013: 2)

concludes that context is more important than international best prac-
tice, which cannot be transplanted uncritically from one environment to
another. There are, however, subtle variants of this proposition.
Schick (1988) argues that developing countries are characterized by
informality rather than formal bureaucratic rules and contracts. A discus-
sion of performance contracts and decentralized authority is characteristic
of a more formal world. He attests that developing countries need old-style
public administration with a framework of rules and a culture of imple-
menting them before NPM reforms can be introduced. Weakening already
weak procedures by giving managers ‘the right to manage’ aggravates the
various problems that NPM tries to ameliorate (see also McCourt, 2013).
There is some evidence to support Schick’s position. Larbi (1999: 26–7),
in a review of performance contracting in developing countries, suggests
that its successful implementation requires certain preconditions. Capacity
issues range from managers’ autonomy through to effective management
information systems and a well-staffed and well-equipped monitoring
agency. These factors are not always present in developing countries.
Hughes (2003: 231–2) points out that NPM is based on applying market
principles to public administration. This entails reducing government and
developing markets. The problem in developing countries is that there is
often little experience in the operation of markets and a range of factors is
required before markets can be effective, such as the rule of law to ensure
contracts. Notwithstanding this, he cautiously suggests that NPM may be
no worse than previous experiences with traditional public administration.
Polidano (1999: 23–4) disputes Schick’s stage-of-development thesis,
arguing inter alia that there is no single historical path towards a profes-
sionalized bureaucracy. He states that the outcome of reforms, rather than
any preconceived arguments, should be the defining issue when judging
NPM. He concludes that the evidence on the impact of NPM is ‘perplex-
ingly equivocal’ (Polidano, 1999: 26). He emphasizes the importance of
contingency factors, arguing that there are few generalizations. Prichard
and Leonard (2010), drawing on multiple data sets on African governance,
argue that ‘pockets’ of effectiveness are likely to exist even in the public
administrations of states that are generally known for poor governance.
This is an implicit critique of Schick’s position.
Manning (2001: 301–3) appears to support aspects of Schick’s argument
but he has a more nuanced position. He advances a few reasons why NPM
has delivered less in developing countries than initially claimed. First,
public expectations of government in developing countries are fundamen-
tally different from those found in the OECD. NPM in developed coun-
tries was built on the expectation that citizens were increasingly becoming

‘angry customers’ who wanted better-quality services. Conversely, public

expectations of service quality from government in many developing
countries are understandably low, with the consequence that citizens are
unlikely to feel that complaints are worth the effort. Furthermore, from
the government perspective, donor conditionalities are a far greater factor
than nascent consumer discontent. Second, some old public disciplines
remained important in the NPM era. For example, there was the assump-
tion that the budget was the defining statement of mutual expectations
between the central agencies and the line departments. It was assumed
that the budget constrained line departments to a particular business area,
while holding the central agencies to the provision of a certain level of
funding. Similarly, the NPM debate assumed that staff, although prone to
self-interest, were largely constrained by some clear standards of behav-
iour. It also assumed that policy was authoritative; for example, streams
of conflicting or inconsistent ministerial decrees did not undermine the
credibility of government policy.
Data on the effect of NPM reforms on service delivery in developing
countries are sketchy. McCourt (2001: 166) states that such evidence as
there is is anecdotal and fragmentary, but there have been very few cases of
recorded service improvement. Manning (2001) suggests that the effects of
NPM in developing countries have been modest, with some improvements
in efficiency and mixed effects on equity. He argues that NPM was no
more able than old public administration to provide governments with the
incentives and the capacity to address poverty and provide better services.
THE RISE OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN

SOUTH AFRICA, 2009
During the apartheid era, South African public service was isolated
and out of touch with international developments (Thornhill, 2008).
Subsequently, during the transition in the early 1990s, very little work
was done by the African National Congress (ANC) on the nature of post-
apartheid administrative change. The nature of the political economy was
a far more important priority. After the 1994 elections, the ANC became
the majority party in parliament and had to apply its mind to public service
reform. There were two major tasks that had to be undertaken. First, there
had to be a transformation from an apartheid-driven bureaucracy towards
a more democratic public service that provided services to the entire popu-
lation, not merely to a minority group. Second, there had to be moderniza-
tion of the public sector. In the early 1990s, NPM was in its heyday and its
tenets had a certain amount of appeal to the new government.

The White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service laid down
the national policy framework for the transformation of the public service
(RSA, 1995). Many of its recommendations were in line with ‘interna-
tional best (NPM) practice’, although the White Paper warned against the
uncritical adoption of a NPM framework (Bardill, 2000: 105). Many of
the goals of the White Paper were further entrenched in the Constitution
(Ncholo, 2000: 88).
The Presidential Review Commission of Inquiry on Transformation
and Reform in the Public Service (PRC) was set up to evaluate the public
service. It made a number of wide- ranging recommendations, some
of which were implemented by the new government (PRC, 1998). The
Commission had international advisers who were steeped in NPM. The
role of PSR in the Commonwealth Secretariat more generally was also
influential. Gasper (2002: 19) states that NPM was promoted in lower-
income countries by the Commonwealth Secretariat (see also Kaul, 1996).
Gasper (2002: 19) also points out that management consultancy groups
were influential in spreading NPM throughout Africa.
It is generally accepted that NPM reforms were influential in South
Africa. Miller (2005: 70) states that ‘much of the reforms (in South Africa)
paralleled those which were implemented in other countries, in particular
Britain and the USA’. The then Director General for the Department of
Public Service and Administration (DPSA), Richard Levin (2004: 12–13),
argued that public sector reform in South Africa has been shaped by the
tenets of NPM, including a strong focus on decentralized management of
human resources and finance (see also DPSA, 2008a: 16). The ex-Minister
for Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, stated
in a 2008 interview that the reforms were not influenced significantly
by NPM ideology. The government wanted to borrow NPM skills and
techniques to modernize the public service without buying into the ideo-
logical framework. There was, however, the acknowledgement that some
NPM reforms had been introduced. She stated that there were a number
of measures that had been introduced that would not be adopted now
(Cameron, 2009: 915).
STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF THE SOUTH

AFRICAN PUBLIC SERVICE
In terms of the 1996 Constitution (RSA, 1996), parliament consists of the

National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). There
are nine provincial governments. The legislative authority of a province is
vested in the elected provincial legislature. Provinces can pass legislation

with regard to any matter within a functional area listed in Schedule 4

(Functional Areas of Concurrent National and Provincial Legislative
Competence) and Schedule 5 (Functional Areas of Exclusive Provincial
Legislative Competence), and other matters assigned to provinces by
national legislation.
Strong local government is an integral part of South Africa’s new
democracy. The Constitution states that a municipality has the right to
govern, on its own initiative, the local government affairs of its commu-
nity, subject to national and provincial legislation. National or provincial
government may not compromise or impede a municipality’s right or
ability to exercise its powers or perform its functions. There are currently
278 municipalities.
The public service consists of national and provincial government.
Local government is separate and each local government is a distinct
public employer, subject to national framework legislation such as labour
law and collective bargaining. In December 2010 there were 1 283 636
public servants, excluding local government employees, estimated at
203 734 (DPSA, 2010).
The cornerstone of the Constitution is a progressive, human-rights-
orientated Constitution that includes a Bill of Rights giving citizens the
right to have access to a number of services, including housing, health care
and water. The Constitution makes specific reference to public adminis-
tration. Section 195 (1) states that public administration must be governed
by democratic values and principles, including the following:
(a) A high standard of professional ethics must be promoted and maintained.

(b) Efficient, economic and effective use of resources must be promoted and
maintained.
(c) Public administration must be development-oriented.
(d) Services must be provided impartially, fairly, equitably and without bias.
(e) People’s needs must be responded to, and the public must be encouraged
to participate in policy-making.
(f) Public administration must be accountable.
(g) Transparency must be fostered by providing the public with timely, acces-
sible and accurate information.
(h) Good human-resource management and career-development practices, to
maximize human potential, must be cultivated.
(i) Public administration must be broadly representative of the South African
people, with employment and personnel practices based on ability,
objectivity, fairness, and the need to redress the imbalances of the past to
achieve broad representation.
The Constitution also provides for an independent Public Service

Commission (PSC) (Section 196 [1]) whose powers include promoting
the Section 195 values and principles and investigating, monitoring and

evaluating the organization and personnel policies and practices of the

public service.
ADMINISTRATIVE DECENTRALIZATION
Before examining administrative decentralization in South Africa we must
look at the political–administrative context within which it occurs.
During the negotiation phase in the early 1990s, the major political
parties agreed on a ‘sunset clause’ that guaranteed the jobs of public serv-
ants who were employed before the 1994 elections (Miller, 2005). This
meant that, once in power, the ANC was faced with bureaucrats who
had implemented apartheid policies – there was genuine concern that old-
guard bureaucrats would thwart the implementation of the policies of the
new government. A survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research
Council in August 1991 showed that the top echelons of the civil service
still strongly supported apartheid laws and practices (DPSA, 2008a: 56).
This led the ANC, once in government, to start appointing people who
shared its ideological values to senior positions in the public service. The
former Minister for the Public Service and Administration, Geraldine
Fraser-Moleketi, explained that ‘you brought in people you could trust,
namely old comrades from the years of struggle’ (Cameron, 2010: 12).
In 1997, the ANC introduced its Cadre Policy and Deployment Strategy,
which advocated political appointments to senior positions in the public
service. It emphasized recruitment from within parties, and potential
deployees were made to understand and accept the basic policies and
programmes of the ANC (Mafunisa, 2003; Maserumule, 2007). The
strategy made no reference to the need for administrative competence.
Similar deployment structures exist at provincial level in respect of pro-
vincial and local management appointees, although there is some doubt
about whether deployment committees function in a systematic way at
sub-national level.
The overall picture is one of high political involvement in appoint-
ments, and significant control over promotion, transfer and performance
(Matheson et al., 2007; Cameron, 2010). This procedure ensures that the
directors general are appointed largely on the basis of political affiliation.
As one senior government minister said, ‘If any of the top two levels of
appointees have expertise, it is a bonus’ (Cameron, 2009: 926). The PSC
(2008a: 38) points out that the British system of professional career heads
of department has largely been replaced by a combination of political and
contract-based appointments (also see Naidoo, 2013).
We now explore administrative decentralization, which is an important

part of NPM. It means giving line managers in government departments

and agencies greater managerial authority and responsibility (Polidano,
1999: 19). Hood (1991: 4–5) describes this perspective as hands-on profes-
sional management: let the managers manage. Devolving human resource
and management functions to managers is an important component of
NPM.
This can be distinguished from devolution of political power to lower
levels of government, generally elected local authorities. These two types
of decentralization are referred to as administrative decentralization and
political decentralization respectively (Polidano, 1999: 19–20). In practice
these different types of decentralization are often conflated. This chapter
focuses on NPM-inspired administrative decentralization.
Whether administrative decentralization in developing countries leads
to better performance is a moot point. Schick (1998) points out that it
would be foolhardy to entrust public managers with complete freedom
over resources when they have not yet internalized the habit of spending
public money according to prescribed rules. Weakening already weak pro-
cedures by giving managers ‘the right to manage’ aggravates the various
problems that NPM tries to ameliorate. In practice there is also limited
delegation in developing countries. McCourt (2013: 6) states that civil
service management remains highly centralized in developing countries.
The reasons are that patronage pressures can be controlled more easily
from a single point, and central bureaucrats are reluctant to delegate
power.
The counter-argument is that of Grindle (1997), quoted in Minogue
(1998: 288), who points out that, while management decentralization is
inextricably linked with the Balkanization of the public sector, it may
also be the only hope of improving the performance of sluggish public
organizations.
Before 1994 the public service was highly centralized. The Commission
for Administration (the predecessor of the PSC) had extensive powers.
These included the setting of wages and salaries, responsibility for dis-
ciplinary authority, pensions, leave, promotions, and evaluating staff
qualifications and requirements. It was also responsible for grading posts
and regulations of conditions of work (DPSA: 2008b: 2; Picard, 2005: 59;
Ncholo, 2000: 89). According to Ncholo (ibid.), then Director General
for DPSA, this was in conflict with international best practice. To rectify
this, human resource functions were transferred to the line departments
(DPSA, 2008b: 53–4).
The Public Service Laws Amendment Act 47 of 1997 made the Minister
for the Public Service and Administration responsible for, inter alia,
policy on the functions of the public service; the determination of policy

on conditions of service, salary scales, wages and allowances according to

class, rank and grade; employment policy; internal organization; organi-
zational structure; and the transfer of functions, post establishment, the
creation, grading and abolition of posts and appointments, promotions
and transfers.
The Act also made provision for the transfer of a number of human
resources functions formerly administered by the PSC to executing
authorities (EAs, ministers in charge of departments), which could, in
turn, delegate these to either directors general, provincial heads of depart-
ment (HoDs) or departmental managers. These included the organization
of staff issues; the appointment, promotion and transfer of members of
staff; performance management; and the obligations, rights and privi-
leges of officers and employees. EAs may delegate to HoDs, and HoDs
in turn may delegate to other employees. The Act confers some broad
powers directly on HoDs, such as the broad responsibility for the efficient
management of their departments, but, given their lack of original human
resources management powers, they are quite limited. In practice this
means that an EA may appoint all staff to the lowest level, unless this func-
tion has been delegated to the HoD (Ncholo, 2000: 89–90; DPSA, 2008b).
A further amendment to the Public Service Act (PSA) in 1998 led
to the structure of provincial departments mirroring that of national
departments. The members of the provincial executive councils (MECs)
responsible for these newly created provincial departments now had the
managerial authority to organize their departments and hire and dismiss
their employees. This meant that there was decentralization of human
resources powers to provincial politicians and not to provincial managers.
During the apartheid era, there were detailed public service staff codes
that tended to be highly regulatory. New Public Service Regulations
(PSR) introduced in July 1999 were intended to repeal the detailed human
resources provisions contained in the then Public Service Staff Code. These
new regulations were intended to promote the decentralization of human
resources powers to managers (RSA, 2001; Adair and Albertyn, 2000: 116).
To what extent have decentralization and delegation to managers
occurred in practice? There is an argument that decentralization has been
a failure. Levin (2004: 13) argued that decentralization has not really
empowered managers, as they have been granted delegation without being
equipped with the necessary resources to utilize it effectively. For example,
the decentralization to managers of the authority to manage leave, sick
leave, discipline, recruitment and retention has been less than satisfac-
tory. The PSC (2004: 4, 34) came to a similar conclusion, stating that
many public service organizations were struggling to meet the required
standards in crucial areas.

An empirical survey conducted by the DPSA (2008b) came to a differ-

ent conclusion. The study found that, while a framework for decentraliza-
tion had been put in place, there had been limited delegation in practice.
The survey requested all national and provincial departments to provide
a list of delegation of powers and duties in terms of the PSA and PSR. Of
the 73 departments that responded (out of a total of 151), 33 per cent had
limited delegation from EAs to HoDs, 39 per cent had average delegation,
18 per cent had above average delegation, and 10 per cent had extensive
delegation. Further data indicated that delegation to officials lower in the
hierarchy was even more limited. A survey of the PSR alone indicated that
56 per cent of EAs had not delegated powers, while in 72 per cent of cases,
powers had not been delegated to officials further down the hierarchy by
either EAs or HoDs. This trend was repeated when the PSA was analysed
separately (DPSA, 2008b: 4–8).
These findings show that most departments are still centralized, with
only 28 per cent of HoDs exercising reasonable degrees of delegation.
The data revealed the beginning of a trend according to which depart-
ments that were performing well were more likely to have delegated a fair
proportion of powers and duties to HoDs. Rather than ‘let the managers
manage’, in line with international good practice, it was a case of ‘let the
politicians manage’ (Cameron, 2009). The Presidency (2013: 27–9) under-
took a more recent study of management practices in the public sector.
This included updated data on, first, approved EA delegations in terms
of the PSA and the PSR, and, second, approved delegations in terms of
the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA). The standard in terms of
approved EA and delegations in terms of the PSA and PSR covers how
EAs delegate decision-making authority for their PSA powers to various
levels in their departments. The standard requires that the delegated
functions be clear, with conditions, and be signed off on each assigned
delegation to minimize the risks. Forty-seven per cent of departments
met the legal/regulatory requirements for public administration delega-
tions. Thirty-four per cent of departments had delegations in place that
were compliant with the PSA and PSR and consistent with the DPSA
framework. Thirteen per cent of departments, in addition to the minimum
requirements of the DPSA delegations framework, demonstrated effective
use of delegations to appropriate levels in the organization and to regional
offices. Thirty-six per cent of departments did not provide evidence of
having any delegations in place.
Seventeen per cent of departments’ delegations did not comply with the
PSA and PSR. In the case of one province (Northern Cape), no EAs had
delegated powers to their HoDs as all delegations had been withdrawn
by the Office of the Premier. A common problem with delegations was

that departments did not document or capture them in a delegations

register, and the conditions of the delegation were not always specified.
Other challenges related to delegations not being signed off by the EA and
the Accounting Officer failing to make such delegations legally binding.
Some delegations as signed by predecessors were in former names of
departments and they were not reviewed.
The report stated that departments, by not delegating authority to the
appropriate levels, experienced delays in decision-making, as decision-
making becomes over-centralized. The absence of delegations, especially
of those matters pertaining to human resources, has a major impact on
departments’ ability to recruit and fill vacancies.
The results for delegations in terms of the PFMA were marginally
better than the results for PSA delegations. Fifty-four per cent of depart-
ments met the legal/regulatory requirements for delegations for financial
administration. Thirty-five per cent had financial delegations in place
that were aligned to Treasury guidelines and the approved departmental
structure. Their delegations register was approved and there was evidence
of delegation from the Accounting Officer to the Chief Financial Officer
and to other officials. Nineteen per cent of departments demonstrated
that delegations were made at the appropriate level. The Presidency study
used a different methodology to that of the DPSA study, which makes it
difficult to compare systematically the respective results. Having said that,
the trends are broadly the same – poor levels of delegation. Forty-seven
per cent of departments met the legal/regulatory requirements for public
administration delegations and 54 per cent of departments met the legal/
regulatory requirements for delegations for financial administration.
The lack of delegations is not only due to the intransigence of poli-
ticians. There is evidence to suggest that managers are not willing to
manage. According to the PSC (2008b: 7–8), some EAs believe that
HoDs needed to exercise good judgement in relation to which areas they
needed to consult on, even if powers had been delegated. The Cameron
study (2009) showed that one of the reasons why delegation was limited
was that managers were not prepared to make tough decisions. Ministers
often have to make the tough decisions, and delegation to managers
will not prevent corruption and patronage. There was a need for man-
agers to provide better leadership. In a similar vein, McLennan (2007:
14–15) states that many institutions formed under apartheid were used
to working under bureaucratic line authority. This meant that officials
were unwilling to take on the responsibility or consequences of more
independent decision-making.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
The second relevant component of NPM is performance management. If

managers are to be given greater autonomy, they need to be held account-
able through performance standards (Minogue, 1998: 26; United Nations,
2005: 55). Hood (1991: 4–5) points out that explicit standards and meas-
ures of performance require that goals are defined and performance
targets are met. This can take the form of using performance indicators
and setting targets. Hughes (2003: 54–5) points out that NPM entails
moving from inputs to outcomes or outputs. There is a need for a perfor-
mance appraisal system to measure both individual and organizational
performance. There is a trade-off between giving managers greater auton-
omy and performance management. In return for being allowed greater
autonomy, managers must be accountable for their performance through
performance targets (Minogue, 1998: 26; United Nations, 2005: 55).
While performance management has in some cases led to improved
service delivery, its efficacy has been questioned, even in developing coun-
tries. Talbot (2005) points out, inter alia, that performance measurement
is about trying to put quantitative values on to many aspects of public ser-
vices that are difficult to quantify; that a consequence of the rewards and
sanctions, coupled with the problems associated with measuring complex
areas of professional practice, may result in changes in behaviour in which
performance is not optimized and, drawing on Lindblom, that public
systems are dominated by politics, which inevitably leads to instability,
incrementalism, muddling through, messy compromises and value judge-
ments that fatally undermine all attempts at rational decision-making.
Hood (2007: 100) argues that gaming, namely the deliberate massaging
or outright fabrication of numbers collected with the intention of improv-
ing the position of an individual or organization, is widespread in British
government. He also states that, where performance is accurately reported
and organizations are genuinely improving their performance, it can lead
to a focus on narrow outcomes or outputs for one agency to the detriment
of other wider policy and programme objectives. Pollitt (2006) states that
there is little evidence that in the USA and in Dutch local government
performance information is actually used in the process of making budget
decisions.
In the literature on the applicability of performance management to
developing countries, there are similar constraints. Larbi (1999: 26–7), in
a review of performance contracting in developing countries, suggests that
its successful implementation requires certain preconditions. Capacity
issues range from managers’ autonomy through to effective management
information systems and a well-staffed and well-equipped monitoring

agency. These factors are not always present in developing countries.

Talbot (2004a: 312–13), in a review of performance management in
Jamaica, states that there is a tendency to adopt a ‘scatter-gun’ approach,
measuring everything and anything that comes into view. Many of the
indicators were operational rather than strategic. This was translated into
vague and imprecise policy indicators.
Conversely, Verheijen and Dobrolyubova (2007), in an analysis of
public management reform process in Latvia, Lithuania and Russia,
reach a different conclusion. They argue that the introduction of such
reforms can be successful even in public management systems that are
not ‘advanced’. This contradicts the widely held notion that performance-
based public management systems are not suitable for ‘developing’
countries. The article concludes that, if sufficient political support and a
dedicated reform team in the civil service are present, and performance
management systems are introduced in a step-by-step manner, significant
improvement in the effectiveness and efficiency of public management
systems can be achieved.
In South Africa the Public Service Laws Amendment Act introduced
performance management. The PSR of 1999 gave performance manage-
ment more flesh (Miller, 2005: 86–9). It was originally for directors and
above. A senior manager who was not an HoD would enter into a perfor-
mance management contract with his or her immediate supervisor, while
in the case of a director general it would be with his or her minister.
Miller (2005: 191) provides three main reasons why performance man-
agement was introduced. The first was to provide an objective measure to
assess managers’ performance. The second was to determine whether they
were performing their functions effectively. The third was to improve the
political–administrative interface.
There are two main official documents that look at organizational
performance management. First, the National Treasury (2007) has pub-
lished Framework for Managing Programme Performance Information. Of
importance is its assertion that budgets are developed in relation to inputs,
activities and outputs, while the aim of management is to achieve the out-
comes and impacts. Second, The Presidency (2009) issued a report entitled
Improving Government Performance, which looks at ways of improving
government’s organizational performance. There is now an emphasis on
the outcomes performance management system. The starting point of
this process is the Medium-Term Strategic Framework (MTSF). It is a
five-year plan arising from the government’s Vision 2025 and other issue-
specific policy research. The MTSF is converted into the main outcome
indicators, approved by Cabinet. They are a simple and clear way of
expressing government’s mandate.

The Presidency plays a supporting role in establishing performance

agreements with ministers and in sectoral delivery agreements, focusing
on a small set of outcomes and a selected group of outputs. Ministers will
cascade results-focused lines of accountability down to senior officials.
The DPSA has produced two main documents dealing with individual
performance management. One is the Senior Management Service (SMS)
Handbook (DPSA, 2003) and the other is the Performance Management
Development System (PMDS) document for salary levels 1–12 (DPSA,
2006). While the framework for performance management is contained
in Chapter 4 of the SMS Handbook, aspects of this PMDS are also
applicable to SMS members. The documents are very similar in perfor-
mance management processes, although the SMS requirements are more
specifically linked to competency requirements.
The following five categories of individual performance are used for
the purpose of performance rating, review and the annual assessment of
employees:
● unacceptable performance (rating 1);

● performance not fully effective (rating 2);
● performance fully effective (rating 3);
● performance significantly above expectations (rating 4); and
● outstanding performance (rating 5).
Performance bonuses and pay progression are given to those who get
a 4 or 5 rating. Ratings of 1 and 2 do not get performance bonuses or
pay progression. A 3 rating gets a pay progression only. The Minister of
Public Service and Administration has determined that only 1.5 per cent
of the departmental remuneration budget can be allocated to performance
bonuses.
Studies have shown that there are substantive problems of implemen-
tation and compliance in respect of both the signing of individual per-
formance agreements and of evaluation (Maphunye, 2001; Miller, 2005;
Cameron, 2009, 2012). A case study of the Department of Labour (DoL,
Cameron, 2012) pointed to a lack of coordination between individual
and organizational performance. This enables the gaming of the system,
through which non-performers still get performance bonuses. A major
problem was that organizational performance is set by the Treasury and
the Presidency, while individual performance is guided by the DPSA’s
framework. There were also different provincial approaches to measuring
data and a lack of capacity at many labour centres.
There were concerns about the low level of compliance in the signing of
performance agreements by senior officials (Public Service Commission

(PSC), 2007: 45–6). The government releases an annual programme of

action that includes a set of top priorities, which it calls ‘Apex priorities’
(now called Government Programme of Action). One of the Apex priorities
in 2008 was to ensure that all SMS members signed performance agreements
in a timely manner (DPSA, 2008b). As at November 2008, 83 per cent of
managers in the public service had done so (DPSA, 2008a). However, in
2010 this dropped to 65 per cent, which was partly due to the fact that the
2009 elections had brought in new ministers who were still familiarizing
themselves with their new portfolios (PSC, 2010: 52). The most recent data
on the compliance rate for the filing of performance agreements of HoDs of
78 per cent was obtained for both the National and Provincial departments
for the 2009/10–2011/12 financial years (PSC, 2011: 34–5).
There is also the possibility that poorly formulated performance agree-
ments may result in appraisal outcomes that are biased, either towards or
against the HoD. These are performance appraisals that fail to show an
adequate correlation between the individual performance of the HoD and
the overall performance of the department (PSC, 2008a: 18). There are a
number of reasons for non-compliance with performance management
regulations, ranging from unforeseen emergencies, work pressures and
restructuring to the frequency of political and administrative leadership
changes, which creates organizational instability (DPSA, 2008b). The PSC
(2011: 35) also stated that the filing of performance agreements had been
delayed because of new appointments. Mechanisms need to be put in place
to ensure that the filing takes place in a timely manner as performance
agreements and evaluation of the performance of the incumbent of the key
post of HoD are important accountability mechanisms.
The PSC also raised problems of performance evaluation in a number
of its reports. In 2004 (PSC, 2004: 16, 34) it pointed out that perfor-
mance management was still a major challenge facing the public service
and described compliance with guidelines as erratic and inconsistent. In
2005/06 it got worse, with 50 per cent of HoDs at national level and 44
per cent at provincial level not being evaluated (PSC, 2008b: 66). More
recent research by the PSC (2011: 33–4) indicates that during the 2008/09
financial year, of the 31 HoDs in national departments who qualified to be
evaluated, only four were in fact evaluated. In the 2009/10 financial year
at national level, there were 16 HoDs who qualified to be evaluated. As
at end October 2011, only two performance assessments were held for the
2009/10 financial year. The technical brief states that this is the worst non-
compliance rate the PSC has ever reported since the inception of the HoD
evaluation framework during the 2001/02 financial year. At provincial
level 72 HoDs qualified to be evaluated for the 2008/09 financial year, of
whom only 29 (40 per cent) were evaluated.

A final indicator was whether departments have established perfor-

mance management systems. The PSC (2011: 35–6) found that the overall
average performance score obtained by the 51 evaluated departments in
the 2009/10 and 2010/11 cycle is 75 per cent. Of the 51 departments, 21
(41 per cent) obtained an excellent score between 81 and 100 per cent.
It has also been noted that 92 per cent of departments have put in place
performance management systems for all departmental programmes.
The fact that a performance management system is in place says
nothing, however, about the quality of the performance information. The
finding of the Attorney General in this regard was illuminating in that 25
out of 35 national departments’ performance information did not comply
with regulatory requirements and was not useful or not reliable. The same
finding applied to 72 per cent of provincial departments.
It can be seen that the signing of performance agreements is less than
optimal and performance evaluation was on the low side. A cynical
interpretation is that there is no need to game the system – if the build-
ing blocks of the performance management system are not in place, it is
not necessary to manipulate the numbers! Furthermore, the quality of
performance information is also inadequate. It appears that this NPM-
driven reform is only skin deep. The evidence suggests that there is not
a substantive performance culture in the South African public service.
However, these problems of implementing performance management are
not unique. These findings are consistent with evidence on performance-
related pay in other countries that is inconclusive and ambiguous (United
Nations, 2005: x; Bourgon, 2007: 49–50).
CORPORATIZATION
The third relevant element of NPM is that of corporatization. Hood (1991:

4–5) refers to this as the disaggregation of units in the public sector. This
involves breaking up central government departments into corporatized
units around services. These units deal with each other on an arm’s-length
basis. There is a split between the small strategic policy core and the large
operational arms of government, which have increased managerial auton-
omy to promote efficient service delivery. These arm’s-length agencies
have greater managerial flexibility in the allocation of human resources
in return for greater accountability for results (also see Larbi, 1999).
Bouckaert and Peters (2004: 46) point out that the rationale of remov-
ing programmes from political organizations is that it enables decisions
to be based on economic and efficiency criteria rather than on political
considerations.

Talbot (2004b: 5) distinguishes between agencies within departments

or the public service, such as Next Steps agencies in the UK, and those
outside the public service, which are commonly called quasi-autonomous
non-governmental organizations (quangos). This categorization is broadly
used in South Africa (DPSA/Treasury, 2005). Pollitt (2004), in a case study
of Latvia, draws a number of lessons for developing countries about the
Anglo-American model of performance agencies. He states, inter alia, that
this model can be successful only when contextual prerequisites are met.
For example, agencies can only be steered by their parent ministries if the
latter bodies have information, appropriate skilled staff and appropriate
levers by which to steer. He concludes that ‘agencification’ is premature.
He argues that giving public agencies greater freedom carries a substan-
tial risk that the autonomy will be exercised for corrupt means and that
the frequent absence of clear policy objectives means that the missions of
agencies remain vague. Talbot (2004a), in a case study on Jamaica, points
out that the executive agencies programme there has made some progress
but warns against large-scale autonomization, stating that a ‘soft state’
can lead to large-scale corruption.
There has been limited research on corporatization in South Africa.
Most of the research has been on public entities that exist outside the
public service. A DPSA/Treasury report (2005: 10–11) concluded that
there was no policy framework in place to guide the process of establishing
and reviewing public entities. This had led to a lack of performance culture
in public entities, and performance targets and review periods are often
not clear. Johannesburg municipality created a number of corporatized
structures to deliver services, but this system has been criticized for lack of
coordination and fragmentation (South African Cities Network, 2007). A
study in Tshwane (Pretoria) municipality came to a similar conclusion by
pointing to ambiguous reporting lines and coordination (HSRC, 2009).
A study by Cameron (2012) examined performance management in a
Next Steps agency in the South African DoL, looking at the roles of the
national office, provincial offices and labour centres. Labour centres form
a government agency that can be defined as an autonomous organiza-
tional component in the public service (DPSA/Treasury, 2005: 5). Policy
making resides in a relatively small national government department and
implementation is the responsibility of labour centres, which have a degree
of autonomy in providing certain labour services. There are also provin-
cial offices of the DoL whose function is to support labour centres. The
article examined the two main components of the DoL, namely the Public
Employment Services (PES) and Inspection Enforcement Services (IES).
The findings were, inter alia, that, despite pockets of excellence, there
was limited evidence to suggest that the agency model has led to more

e fficient service delivery. This finding conforms to previous studies (Schick,

1998; Larbi, 1999; Pollitt, 2004), which suggest that the Next Steps agen-
cies model is perhaps not appropriate for developing countries. Pollitt’s
(2004: 293) conclusion on the Latvian case study was that ‘decentralising
many functions to autonomous agencies was trying to run before the public
service could walk’. This is equally valid for the South African case. The
DoL case study showed that autonomous labour centres have contributed
to poorly skilled and patronage appointments and, consequently, to poor
performance. Not only are many labour centres characterized by poor per-
formance, but there is little that the national department can do to intervene
because of the autonomy given to these Next Steps agencies. Furthermore,
although the national DoL staff are responsible for targets, they have no say
over performance at labour centres, which are headed by regional managers
and are accountable to the respective Chief Director: Provincial Operations
in the respective provinces. The NPM assumption that removing decisions
from direct political control will lead to decisions being made on efficiency
grounds rather than being based on political criteria is not borne out by this
case study. Perhaps a merit-based public service is a precondition for the
introduction of Next Steps agencies in developing countries.
A final point is that the next-step NPM structure of the department,
which splits functions into policy and implementation arms, does not
lend itself particularly well to countries where there are three different
structures, namely head office, provincial offices and labour centres. It
is cumbersome and has led to unclear reporting lines. In particular, there
appeared to be overlap between the national and provincial government
roles. Both provide support and capacity building to labour centres.
CONCLUSION
This chapter looked at how deeply three key NPM reforms, namely
administrative delegation, performance management and corporatization,
have worked themselves into the South African public service.
While a framework for administrative decentralization has been put in
place, in practice there has not been as much decentralization as is nor-
mally presumed. There has been limited delegation to managers by min-
isters. There is a view among politicians that delegation has been limited
because managers do not provide proper leadership. There appears to be
a paradox. On the one hand, politicians want improved service delivery by
the public service, yet on the other hand they do not trust senior bureau-
crats, many of whom are political appointees, to perform this implementa-
tion role (Cameron, 2012).

Performance management is a major component of public service

reform in South Africa. Although there are well-developed performance
management frameworks, they have been applied only erratically and
inconsistently. The quality of performance information is inadequate,
while the signing of performance agreements and performance evaluation
is on the low side. There is also a major disjuncture between individual
and organizational performance. A major problem was that organiza-
tional performance is set by the Treasury and the Presidency, while indi-
vidual performance is guided by the DPSA’s framework. There were also
different provincial approaches to measuring data, and a lack of capacity.
Limited literature is available on the performance of corporatized agen-
cies. What the available documentation suggests is that the corporatized
agency model has not necessarily led to more efficient service delivery. A
case study of the DoL pointed out that autonomous labour centres have
contributed to patronage appointments, which are not based on skill
and have consequently led to poor performance. There is little that the
national office can do to intervene because of the autonomy given to these
agencies. Attempts to generalize from a single case study must obviously
be treated with caution. Notwithstanding this, the study does suggest that
there is a need to strengthen the core of the public service in developing
countries before creating arm’s-length Next Steps agencies.
These findings confirm the view that NPM techniques do not travel
particularly well to developing countries. Whether this is primarily due to
Schick’s argument that ‘you need to crawl before you walk’ or to contin-
gent factors is not entirely clear. More research is needed in this regard.
What about the future direction of the public service? The National
Planning Commission published its National Development Plan (NDP),
which set out the country’s vision for 2030. Chapter 13 of its diag-
nostic report looked at improving the capacity of South Africa’s state
institutions/bureaucracy. It made a number of recommendations to stabi-
lize the political–administrative interface. These included:
● ensuring that the public service is immersed in the development

agenda but insulated from undue political interference;
● strengthening the oversight role of the PSC departments to
respond to the PSC proposals and giving greater force to PSC
recommendations;
● creating an administrative head of the public service with respon-
sibility for managing the career progression of HoDs, including
convening panels for recruitment processes, performance assess-
ments and disciplinary procedures. At provincial level, the same role
should be played by the director general in the Office of the Premier;

● using a selection panel convened by the chair of the PSC and the
administrative head of the public service to draw up a shortlist of
suitable candidates for top posts. The selection panel should make
use of competency tests and other assessment mechanisms;
● moving towards long-term contracts for HoDs and reducing the use
of three-year contracts;
● amending the Public Service Act to locate responsibility for human
resources management with the HoD.
The report did not say anything about improving performance manage-
ment and the efficiency of Next Steps agencies, which, certainly in the case
of the former, was surprising. What is of relevance for this chapter is its sug-
gestion that human resource management be located with the HoD. While
the government is committed to implementing the NDP, there is evidence
that it is less than keen to lose control of human resource management.
In summary, while it is true that there are elements of NPM in the public
service reform programme, they have not been systematically applied nor
are they likely to be implemented rigorously in the future. As Polidano
(1999: 3) remarks, ‘NPM initiatives may be little more than a minor strand
of reform, the froth at the top of the glass’.
REFERENCES
Adair, B. and Albertyn, C. (2000), ‘Restructuring management in the public service:

implications for new legislation’, in G. Adler (ed.), Public Service Labour Relations in a
Democratic South Africa, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 110–25.
Bardill, J.E. (2000), ‘Towards a culture of good governance: the Presidential Review
Commission and public service reform in South Africa’, Public Administration and
Development, 103–18.
Bouckaert, G. and Peters, G.B. (2004), ‘What is available and what is missing in the study
of quangos’, in C. Pollitt and C. Talbot (eds), Unbundled Government. A Critical Analysis
of the Global Trend to Agencies, Quangos and Contractualisation, London: Routledge,
pp. 22–49.
Bourgon, J. (2007), ‘Responsive, responsible and respected government: towards a new
public administration theory’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 73(1), 5–26.
Cameron, R. (2009), ‘New Public Management reforms in the South African public service:
1999–2009’, Journal of Public Administration, 44(4.1), 910–42.
Cameron, R. (2010), ‘Redefining political–administrative relationships in South Africa’,
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 76(4), 676–701.
Cameron, R. (2012), ‘Performance management and corporatisation in a developing
country: the case of the South African Department of Labour’, paper presented at the 5th
International SPMA Conference, University of Pretoria, 16–17 November.
Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) (2003), Senior Management
Service Handbook, Pretoria: DPSA.
DPSA (2006), Performance Management and Development System for Salary Levels 1–12,
Pretoria: DPSA.

DPSA (2008a), 15 Year Review. A Review of Changes in the Macro-Organisation of the State:
1994–2008, Pretoria: DPSA.
DPSA (2008b), Summary Report to the July 2008 Lekgotla. Status regarding HR delegations
from EAs to HoDs in the public service, Pretoria: DPSA.
DPSA (2008c), Cabinet Lekgotla Report APEX Project 15: Regularise Employment and
Performance Employment and Performance Agreements at Designated Levels, Pretoria:
DPSA.
DPSA (2010), Personnel Statistics, Pretoria: DPSA.
DPSA and National Treasury (2005), Policy Framework for the Governance and Administration
of Public Sector Institutions, Pretoria: DPSA.
Frederickson, H.G. and Smith, K.B. (2003), The Public Administration Theory Primer,
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Gasper, D. (2002), ‘Fashion, learning and values in public management: reflections on South
African and international experience’, Africa Development, 27(3–4), 17–47.
Hood, C. (1991), ‘A public management for all seasons’, Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.
Hood, C. (2007), ‘Public service management by numbers: why does it vary? Where has it
come from? What are the gaps and the puzzles?’, Public Money and Management, 27(2),
95–102.
Hughes, O.E. (2003), Public Management and Administration. An Introduction, 3rd edn, New
York: Macmillan.
Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) (2009), ‘Analysing institutional blockages to
service delivery in the city of Tshwane’, unpublished paper, Pretoria: HSRC.
Kaul, M. (1996), ‘Civil service reforms: lessons from commonwealth experience’, Public
Administration and Development, 16(2), 131–50.
Larbi, A. (1999), ‘The New Public Management approach and crisis states’, UNRISD
Discussion Paper No. 112, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development.
Levin, R. (2004), ‘Building a unified system of public administration’, speech delivered at the
2nd Public Service Conversation, Gordons Bay.
Mafunisa, J. (2003), ‘Separation of politics from the South African public service: rhetoric or
reality?’, Journal of Public Administration, 38(2), 85–101.
Manning, N. (2001), ‘The legacy of new public management in developing countries’,
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 67(2), 298–312.
Maphunye, K.J. (2001), ‘The South African senior public service: roles and structures in
post-1994 departments’, Journal of Public Administration, 36(4), 312–23.
Maserumule, H. (2007), ‘Conflicts between directors-general and ministers in South Africa:
a “postulative” approach’, Politikon, 34(2), 147–64.
Matheson, A., Weber, B., Manning, N. and Arnould, E. (2007), ‘Study on the political
involvement in senior staffing and on the delineation of responsibilities between ministers
and senior civil servants’. OECD Working Papers on Public Governance No 6. Paris:
OECD Publishing.
McCourt, W. (2001), ‘The NPM agenda for service delivery: a suitable model for develop-
ing countries?’, in W. McCourt and M. Minogue (eds), The Internationalisation of Public
Management. Reinventing the Third World State, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton,
MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 107–28.
McCourt, W. (2013), ‘Models of public service reform: a problem solving approach’,
Washington, DC: World Bank Working Paper 6428.
McLennan, A. (2007), ‘Unmasking delivery: revealing politics’, Progress in Developmental
Studies, 7(1), 5–20.
Meier, K.J. and O’Toole, L.J. (2008), ‘The proverbs of New Public Management: lessons
from an evidence-based research agenda’, The American Review of Public Administration,
4–22.
Miller, K. (2005), Public Sector Reform: Governance in South Africa, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Minogue, M. (1998), ‘Changing the state: concepts and practice in the reform of the
public sector’, in M. Minogue, C. Polidano and D. Hume (eds), Beyond the New

Public Management: Changing Ideas and Practices in Governance, Cheltenham, UK and

Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 17–37.
Naidoo, V. (2013), ‘Cadre deployment versus merit? Reviewing politicisation in the public
service’, in D. Pillay, J. Daniel, P. Naidoo and R. Southall (eds), New South African
Review 3: The Second Phase – Tragedy or Farce? Johannesburg: Wits University Press,
pp. 261–77.
National Planning Commission (2012), National Development Plan 2030. Our Future – Make
it Work, Pretoria: NPC.
National Treasury (2007), Framework for Managing Programme Performance Information,
Pretoria: Treasury.
Ncholo, P. (2000), ‘Reforming the public service in South Africa: a policy framework’, Public
Administration and Development, 20, 87–102.
Picard, L.A. (2005), The State of the State: Institutional Transformation, Capacity and
Political Change in South Africa, Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Polidano, C. (1999), ‘The New Public Management in developing countries’, IDPM Public
Policy and Management Working Paper No. 13.
Pollitt, C. (1993), Managerialism and the Public Services: Cuts or Cultural Changes in the
1990s, 2nd edn, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Pollitt, C. (2004), ‘Castles built on sand? Agencies in Latvia’, in C. Pollitt and C. Talbot (eds),
Unbundled Government. A Critical Analysis of the Global Trend to Agencies, Quangos and
Contractualisation, London: Routledge, pp. 283–96.
Pollitt, C. (2006), ‘Performance information for democracy. The missing link?’, Evaluation,
12(1), 38–55.
Presidential Review Commission (PRC) (1998), Developing a Culture of Good Governance.
Report of the Presidential Review Commission on the Reform and Transformation of the
Public Service in South Africa, Pretoria: PRC.
Prichard, W. and Leonard, D.L. (2010), ‘Does reliance on tax revenue build state capacity
in sub-Saharan Africa?’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 76(4), 653–75.
Public Service Commission (PSC) (2004), State of the Public Service Report, Pretoria: PSC.
PSC (2007), State of the Public Service Report, Pretoria: PSC.
PSC (2008a), The Turnover Rates of Heads of Department and Its Implications for the Public
Service, Pretoria: PSC.
PSC (2008b), A Report on Strategic Issues Emanating from the Evaluation of Heads of
Department, Pretoria: PSC.
PSC (2010), State of the Public Service Report 2010. Integration, Coordination and Effective
Service Delivery, Pretoria: PSC.
PSC (2011), Fact Sheet on the State of Public Service, Pretoria.
Republic of South Africa (RSA) (1995), White Paper on the Transformation of the Public
Service, Government Gazette 365(16838) of 1995, Pretoria.
RSA (1996), The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act No. 108 of 1996, Pretoria:
Government Printer.
RSA (2001), Public Service Regulations. 2001 Government Gazette, No. R. 1 of 5 January
2001 as amended, Pretoria.
Schick, A. (1998), ‘Why most developing countries should not try New Zealand reforms’,
The World Bank Research Observer 13(1), 123–31.
Simon, H. (1952), ‘Development of theory of democratic administration: replies and com-
ments’, American Political Science Review, 46(2), 494–503.
South African Cities Network (2007), State of City Finances Report 2007. Cape Town.
Talbot, C. (2004a), ‘A radical departure? Executive agencies in Jamaica’, in C. Pollitt
and C. Talbot (eds), Unbundled Government. A Critical Analysis of the Global Trend to
Agencies, Quangos and Contractualisation, London: Routledge, pp. 297–315.
Talbot, C. (2004b), ‘The agency ideas: sometimes old, sometimes new, sometimes borrowed,
sometimes untrue’, in C. Pollitt and C. Talbot (eds), Unbundled Government. A Critical
Analysis of the Global Trend to Agencies, Quangos and Contractualisation, London:
Routledge, pp. 3–21.

Talbot, C. (2005), ‘Performance management’, in E. Ferlie, L. Lynn and C. Pollitt (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of Public Management, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 491–517.
The Presidency (2009), Improving Government Performance: Our Approach, Pretoria.
The Presidency (2013), State of Management Practices in the Public Service. Results of
Management Performance Assessments for the 2012/13 Financial Year, Pretoria.
Thornhill, C. (2008), ‘Research in South Africa: some South African developments’,
Administratio Publica, 1–18.
Verheijen, T. and Dobrolyubova,Y. (2007), ‘Performance management in the Baltic States
and Russia: success against the odds?’, International Review of Administrative Sciences,
73(2), 205–15.
United Nations (2005), Unlocking the Human Potential for Public Sector Performance. World
Public Sector Report. New York: Department of Social and Economic Affairs.

7. The political economy of administrative
reforms in Egypt: governance, reforms
and challenges
Ahmed Badran
INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on public administration reforms and governance

in Egypt. As was the case with many other emerging economies, reform-
ing state machinery and public bodies has been regarded as a means for
achieving broader social and economic developmental goals in Egypt.
Consequently, the Egyptian administrative system has been subject to
different reform initiatives aiming at changing structures, functions and
cultures of Egyptian public organizations. The features and main charac-
teristics of each administrative reform programme were greatly shaped by
the overall socioeconomic and political context, as well as the prevailing
vision and ideological views about the role of the state in the society.
The state–society relationship, in terms of the role of the state in social
and economic spheres, has been redefined several times since the revolu-
tion of 1952, based on the dominant political ideology. At least three dif-
ferent models can be identified in the modern history of Egypt: a welfare
state model in 1952–70; a mixed state–market model in 1970–81; and
a regulatory state model from 1981 to the present. The socialist era of
President Nasser, 1952–70, was characterized by an ever-growing role of
the state in economic and social domains. The function of the state at that
time was defined as to re-engineer and restructure the Egyptian society in
order to achieve social equity and economic development. All means of
production have come under the direct control of the state and its appara-
tus, following a wide movement of nationalization for the main industrial
and economic projects. The state has become the major producer of goods
and the main provider of a wide range of social and economic services
via public sector organizations. The Egyptian state has become the prin-
cipal agent for redistributing wealth among the different groups in the
society, and has presented itself as the grantor for the rights of weak and
disadvantaged Egyptians.
President Sadat, the successor of President Nasser from 1970 to 1981,
did not believe as strongly in the role of the public sector and state
158

The political economy of administrative reforms in Egypt 159
machinery in modernizing the Egyptian state and achieving the hoped-for

economic growth. He was more inclined to accept the notion of liberal
markets and focused his reform efforts on giving more space to the partici-
pation of the private sector in service provision under what was known as
the ‘open door’ policy. None the less, Sadat’s regime was not able to com-
pletely undo Nasser’s policies, particularly as regards the role of the state
in social services provision, including education, employment and health
care. Therefore the best way to describe the state–society relationship
under his leadership is by presenting it as a hybrid model that included a
major role of the state and the public sector, and a relatively limited and
minor role of the private sector.
During the 1980s and throughout the 1990s the consecutive Egyptian
governments have been forced to rethink and reconsider the role of the
state in a society driven by accumulated foreign debts and a huge deficit in
public budgets. The Egyptian welfare state has gone through a crisis as it
did not keep its promises in social and economic areas. The performance
record of public sector organizations was poor and the quality of provided
goods and services was even poorer. These worsened economic conditions
paved the way in 1991 to the intervention of the global financial institu-
tions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank (WB), which gave Egypt a ready-made prescription to reform its
deteriorating economy via what is known as stabilization and structural
adjustment programmes (Alissa, 2007). The reform prescription was long
and included many reforms. Chief among these were the privatization of
state enterprises, the liberalization of economic sectors and the downsizing
of public sector organizations. The introduction of new liberal economic
reforms and the growing role and importance of private sector organiza-
tions in production and service provision have denoted the emergence of
a new model of state–society relations; that gave rise to the birth of the
Egyptian regulatory state (Badran, 2013).
The discussion in this chapter is based on the changes in the major con-
tours of the role of the Egyptian state and its institutions in society. The
chapter focuses primarily on the political economy of the administrative
reform in an attempt to underline the dynamics between the bureaucrats
and politicians, and the ways in which such dynamics have been reflected
in reform initiatives. For contextualization purposes, the institutional
and legal foundations of the Egyptian administrative governance system
will be discussed in the next section. The third section focuses on the
politics of the administrative reform processes and the changing role of
the Egyptian state in society. The following sections discuss the persistent
reform issues and the initiatives to address the problems of the Egyptian
bureaucracy.

CONTEXTUALIZING ADMINISTRATIVE
GOVERNANCE IN EGYPT: INSTITUTIONAL AND
LEGAL FOUNDATIONS
Before going into a detailed discussion of the administrative reform and

modernization processes of the Egyptian bureaucracy, it might be useful
to shed some light on the main characteristics of the broader institutional
and legal context. As per the Egyptian Constitution, the political system
in Egypt is based on the notion of republicanism, with a wide range of
authorities given to the president of the state. In that sense, the politi-
cal system in Egypt is normally described as a hybrid system with semi-
presidential features. From an institutional perspective, the Constitution
identifies the main players, roles and responsibilities as well as relation-
ships and interaction mechanisms among those players. Considering the
focal analytical point of this chapter, a brief description of three main
players will be provided: the presidency, the Cabinet and the legislative.
Under the 1971 Constitution, the president of Egypt enjoyed many
powers, and many authorities were at his disposal. As head of state,
the president is expected to span the boundaries of different institutions
to guarantee the full functioning of the different parts of the system
(Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt, 1971, article 73). At the exec-
utive level, ‘The President of the Republic shall assume executive power
and shall exercise it in the manner stipulated in the Constitution’ (article
137). In that sense, the president is expected to work in collaboration
with the Egyptian government to form and implement public policies. To
this end, the president has been granted many executive powers, includ-
ing appointing and removing the prime minister (article 141), as well as
dealing directly with the council of ministers in terms of calling meetings,
presiding at the council’s meetings and asking for reports (article 142).
Additionally, the president has the power to appoint and dismiss public
and military officials, and to issue disciplinary and legal enforcement
regulations (articles 43–45). He also has the right to take decisions regard-
ing the creation and organization of public services, and to issue decrees
that have the force of law when the parliament is not in session. Many of
these powers have not been used following the revolution of January 2011.
New restrictions in the draft constitution of 2012 have none the less been
imposed on the way in which the president exercises these powers, with
more authority given to the parliament in supervising the government’s
activities (Kirkpatrick, 2012).
The Egyptian Cabinet represents the supreme executive and adminis-
trative body of the state, and consists of the prime minister, the cabinet
ministers and their deputies (Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt,

1971, article 153). Unlike in parliamentary systems, the Egyptian prime

minister plays a supervisory role as the actual executive powers are in
the hands of the presidents. The Cabinet has considerable influence on
shaping the agenda for the parliament through proposing public policies
and new legislation. It also has a great impact on the implementation of
policies as it has the power to control and coordinate the work of the
ministries and streamline the activities of executive authorities in order to
meet policy goals and objectives. The hierarchy of the Egyptian Cabinet
includes six levels: the prime minister; the ministers; the ministers of state;
the ministers without portfolio; the chairmen of departments; and the
ministers’ delegate. Since the revolution of 2011, consecutive short-term
governments have been formed to lead the country through such a critical
and sensitive transitional period. The task nevertheless seemed to be so
challenging that we have witnessed three governments in fewer than three
years. At the time of writing, the existing Cabinet has been working under
the leadership and supervision of Hazem Al Beblawi since July 2013, with
a composition of 34 members (Ahram Online, 2013).
The legislative function in Egypt is exercised by a bi-cameral parlia-
ment encompassing two chambers: the upper chamber known as the
Consultative Council or Maglis El-Shura; and the lower chamber, the
People’s Assembly or Maglis El-Shaab. It is worth mentioning in this
regard that the composition of the legislative branch is under considera-
tion at the time of writing from the 50-member committee responsible for
the revision and redrafting of the 2012 Constitution, and that the abolition
of Maglis El-Shura is highly likely. Those who oppose Maglis El-Shura
(54 per cent of the committee members) claim that its legislative role is
considerably limited and the cost for running the council adds to the
burden of the exhausted public budget. They also argue that the creation
of the council by President Sadat in 1981 has had a specific purpose: to
keep an eye on the national press and not to play a major role in making
legislation. On the other hand, those who support the existence of Maglis
El-Shura argue that the abolition of the council will result in a great loss
of expertise. It will also cede new legislative power to the president of the
state, particularly in the case of the absence of Maglis El-Shaab. From this
angle, adding more powers to the president contradicts the goal of limiting
presidential powers in the new constitutions and giving more authority to
the parliament (AllAfrica, 2013).
Compared with the executive branch, namely the presidency, the
Egyptian parliament appears to have limited power and authority over
the activities of the government authorities. Although the constitutions of
1971 and 2012 have given the Egyptian parliament the right to hold minis-
ters to account using different tools, including voting a motion of censure,

the utilization of such tools and their influence were quite limited and in
most of the cases superficial. This deficiency in the relationship between
the executive and legislative branches of government is being addressed
in the redrafting of the Constitution of 2012, which aims to establish a
balance between the two branches, with more powers given to the parlia-
ment to effectively supervise, control and hold to account government
ministers (Kirkpatrick, 2012).
THE POLITICS OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN

EGYPT: THE ROLE OF THE STATE
Bureaucracy is a long-standing and deeply rooted phenomenon in Egypt:

it is as old as the notion of the state itself in ancient Egypt. The very first
idea of a unified central state in Egypt was achieved by King Menes,
who unified the northern and the southern parts of Egypt under his reign
more than 7000 years ago (Ayubi, 1991). At that time, the establishment
of a central state was regarded as a necessity for controlling the River
Nile and for organizing farming and irrigation activities (CIPE, 2010).
Modern Egypt as a sovereign nation state can, however, be traced to
the reign of Mohammed Ali Pasha (1805–48), who attempted to build
up a modern army and to develop an educational system that served his
ambitions to modernize the Egyptian state socially and economically.
The efforts to modernize the Egyptian state under Mohammed Ali Pasha
were not fruitful for internal and external reasons. Internally, the lack of
accountability and the absence of control and monitoring mechanisms
were among the chief shortcomings of the modernization project. At the
external level, the pressures, particularly from the European countries,
which regarded the rise of modern Egypt as a threat to their interests in
the region, ended the developmental plans of Mohammed Ali. The col-
lapse of the modernization project paved the way to the British occupa-
tion in 1882.
Mohammed Ali’s successors ruled the country under the British occu-
pation until 1952. During this period none of the kings of Egypt presented
a comprehensive reform project to modernize the Egyptian state similar
to that put forward by Mohammed Ali. They were much less ambitious
and in many situations they had to consult the British authorities before
taking any decisions. Foreign debts have accumulated in Egypt because
of the irresponsible borrowing of the rulers, and corruption has become
the norm at different personal and administrative levels. The gap between
the poor and the rich has increased and wealth concentration has reached
its peak. The lack of social justice, in addition to the spread of corruption

in the monarchy, was among the prime drivers for the revolution of 1952,
which abolished the monarchy in Egypt and established republicanism.
The Interventionist State of Egypt: Nasser’s Welfare Model
The revolution of 1952 marked a new episode in the history of modern

Egypt, with new ideological and political orientations. The role of the state
in Egyptian society was redefined and more responsibilities and tasks were
assigned to the state apparatus. As reported by CIPE (2010: 16),
The government’s responsibility expanded after the Egyptian Revolution of

1952 and it began to assume new roles such as direct investment in the indus-
trial, agricultural and commercial public sectors, offering basic services to its
citizens in the fields of health, education, housing, and transport among other
sectors.
A comprehensive developmental project was launched under the notion of

Arab nationalism, with an eminent role assigned to the Egyptian bureau-
cracy in leading the transformation process. The role of the private sector
in the economy was limited to commercial activities and small business
with no role to play in the grand scheme of re-engineering society. This
limited role became even more restricted following the large-scale nation-
alization programme in 1961. As noted by Alissa (2007: 2), ‘At the time,
feudal and semi-feudal relations ruled over rural areas, while the private
sector dominated commerce and small industries’. Direct government
interventions were planned and designed to lead and protect the infant
national industry and to keep control over foreign currencies.
The interventionist role of the state during President Nasser’s reign was
manifested in the growing size of public sector organizations as a result
of the establishment of new projects and industries, in addition to the
nationalization of many private industries at the end of the 1950s (Ayubi,
1991). Added to this, the central tendency of the state during the 1950s and
the 1960s, as well as the obligation of the state at that time to achieve full
employment via what were called Tawzeef policies, have also contributed
to the expansion of the public sectors. As noted by Sayed (2004: 10), ‘the
1961 “graduate policy” of the interventionist socialist state took upon
itself to employ all university graduates to match the enlarged role of the
state’. The aim at that time was to fill the gap created by the departure of
expatriates who occupied different positions in the Egyptian bureaucracy.
The Ministry of Labour Force has played a major role in Tawzeef policies
as a central agency responsible for recording and allocating university
graduates to the different ministries and bureaucratic units. One major
shortcoming of these policies was that the distribution of the graduates

was undertaken on a quantitative and not qualitative basis. This means

that graduates were employed based on the needs of public organizations
regardless of their area of specialization. At later stages, the enormous
bureaucratic organizations thus created have developed survival strate-
gies and have defended their existence against any attempts to reform,
modernize or change their status quo (Ayubi, 1991).
Consequently, a new bureaucratic elite from the well-educated upper
and middle classes started to emerge and to gain importance in delivering
the intended developmental goals identified by the regime. The composi-
tion of the elite has changed at different stages of the implementation
process, however. The regime relied at the beginning on the military elite
to run the state apparatus; however, this trend changed in later stages to
rely more on technocrats, namely engineers and economists. This shift
from ‘militocracy’ to technocratic governments was needed to provide
the expertise and specializations for mega-projects initiated at that time,
including the high dam and the steel complex (Ayubi, 1991). The pre-
eminence of the newly emerged bureaucratic elite became quite obvious,
with the Egyptian bureaucracy growing and becoming an integrated part
of the state machinery. In this regard, Ayubi (1991: 7) has noted that ‘there
was certainly an element of charismatic leadership, mass agitation, and
socialist rhetoric but the actual running of the regime remained firmly in
the hands of the bureaucrats: firstly military and then increasingly techno-
crats’. State monopolies were extended to include many strategic sectors
such as the banking sector, public utilities and the trade sector. The expan-
sion of state ownership in these areas resulted in a sharp decline in private
projects and investments, which were basically restricted to agriculture,
real estate and the informal economy (Alissa, 2007). The government used
the public budget to subsidize a wide range of services and basic goods,
accompanied by a noticeable increase in military expenditure.
Despite every effort to establish an effective and specialized bureaucratic
regime in order to achieve economic and social goals, the performance
record of the Egyptian bureaucracy at that time was not so impressive. As
reported by CIPE (2010: 16), ‘As the government began to establish public
facilities and to administrate them, bureaucratic diseases began to inten-
sify’. On the one hand, joining the civil service at that time was a means
to gain social status and to be a part of the developmental trajectory of
the state. A wide range of services in areas such as education, health and
social security was provided via public organizations. The public sector
was seen as a vehicle for social mobility and as an arena that would reach
full employment and hire new graduates. On the other hand, many com-
plaints about the red tape and routine in delivering governmental services
have been documented, in addition to many other problems related to

coordination and cooperation among the gigantic body of government in

relation to implementing economic and social reforms. Furthermore, the
overstaffing of public organizations has also contributed to the deteriora-
tion of public sector performance and created a new form of unemploy-
ment known as disguised unemployment, wherein new graduates were
hired for no reason or need but to fulfil employment obligations by the
state. Many of these issues have become chronic maladies in the body of
the Egyptian administrative system until the time of writing (2013).
From Bureaucracy to Oligarchy: Sadat’s Technocratic State
By the end of the 1960s it was quite clear that the Egyptian bureaucratic
leviathan had become too big to perform efficiently. Therefore President
Sadat started to change the orientation of the economic and social compass
to focus more on the private sector and less on public organizations for
delivering public services and goods. Ayubi (1991) none the less has rightly
noted that it would be inaccurate to attribute the ideological changes at
this stage solely to the change in leadership. The Egyptian bureaucratic
elite, the most beneficial party from the creation of the public sector and
the expansive role of the state, found itself at a cross-roads. On the one
hand, Egyptian bureaucrats realized that it was almost impossible to carry
on working with existing structures with all their shortcomings, particu-
larly the financial losses of the public sector. But, at the same time, they
were reluctant to accept drastic changes that might affect their privileges
and the benefits they receive because of their positions. Three main trends
can be identified among Egyptian bureaucrats at that time in relation to
how to reform the administrative systems. A conservative group of bureau-
crats were in favour of continuing to do business as usual through public
sector organizations. Another group of civil servants preferred a full shift
to a capitalist economic system and a move from public to private forms of
organization. The third group of bureaucrats tried to find a middle ground
and was more pragmatic, starting to think about how to benefit from their
positions in the public sector when doing business with the private sector.
A new pattern of relations between bureaucrats and private investors
emerged: the least that can be said about it is that it was corrupt. The
revolving-door effect was quite evident, with many senior civil servants
and ex-military personnel leaving the public sector to join the vibrant and
lucrative private sector at that time. Ayubi (1991: 14) has commented on
this phenomenon:
From the late sixties and early seventies ex-army officers and high govern-
ment officials were moving consistently into private business . . . among the

prominent businessmen in 1976 one could count two ex-premiers, twenty-two

ex-ministers, dozens of ex-chairmen of public enterprises, undersecretaries of
state and governors.
Public managers and senior government officials started to think of ways

in which they could utilize their networks and connections, in addition to
the wealth they accumulated over the years, to benefit from the new shift
in state ideology to focus more on the private sector. Some of them started
their own private businesses while in public office and entered into differ-
ent forms of transactions and deals that benefited their private businesses
at the expense of the public organizations they ran. Other forms of mis-
conduct have also been reported, wherein the private sector has exploited
public organizations using different methods, including commissions and
bribes to public managers in return for contracts to supply their organiza-
tions with products from private companies. The prices of the supplied
material and goods were of course much higher than their market value
(sometimes 400 per cent higher). The facilities of public sector organiza-
tions, including personnel and means of transportation, were used in ways
that benefited the private businesses of public managers or their relatives.
The lack of effective internal monitoring plus the absence of accountabil-
ity mechanisms facilitated the misconduct undertaken by bureaucrats and
resulted in a situation in which the private sector flourished at the expense
of the public sector.
The victory of the Egyptian army in 1973 in its war against Israel gave
President Sadat and his regime more legitimacy and boosted his policies,
particularly on the economic front. The new orientation towards capital-
ism and the increasing role of the private sector materialized on the ground
in the form of what was known as the ‘open-door policy’ or Infitah. The
blueprint of this policy was the October paper in which President Sadat
called for ‘Opening up the Egyptian economy to foreign investment and
inter-Arab joint investment projects, as well as promoting the role of the
private sector in the economy’ (Alissa, 2007: 3). This policy orientation
was translated into concrete terms with the promulgation of Law No. 43
of June 1974. The law encouraged private investments, including foreign
investment, by granting investors tax holidays and exemptions.
The ‘open-door policy’ was justified on different grounds; nevertheless,
its overall rationale is still quite vague. For some, Infitah was more than
an economic policy; it represents a master policy with implications in dif-
ferent socioeconomic and administrative areas. The idea was to combine
Egyptian human capital with the know-how of the Western countries,
namely the USA and Japan, and the surpluses of oil revenues in the Gulf
to achieve economic development in Egypt. The newly emergent class of

businessmen (former state bureaucrats and military officials) acted as a

catalyst for such a transformation. By doing so, they have turned against
the very administrative system that benefited them the most. The new busi-
ness elite also rejected any etatist policies or social rhetoric and called for
cutting down the public sector and lifting existing limitations on wealth.
By the end of the 1970s and during the early 1980s the public sector in
Egypt was in an awkward position. At the outset, the open-door policy
pursued by President Sadat limited but did not put an end to the interven-
tionist state created by President Nasser. As noted by Sayed (2004: 3), ‘Even
though Sadat attempted to give more space to market economy through
the open door policy, he did not alter the interventionist functions of the
state’. Consequently, Egypt ended up with a public sector that was com-
peting unfairly with a young and fast-growing private sector while being
totally isolated from any grand political ideology and any clear idea about
its role in society compared with the economic enterprise. Additionally,
the public sector was run by experts who lacked public spirit and had little
belief in the value of public organizations. Economic burdens that resulted
from the wars Egypt was involved in, particularly the defeat of 1967, also
contributed to the problems of the public sector alongside the different
forms of corruption and exploitation by the private sector. All these short-
comings and symptoms have paved the way for another reconsideration
and redefinition of the role of the Egyptian state and public administration
in Egyptian society. The emphasis this time was on the state as a regulator
and rule-maker rather than as a direct service provider or producer.
The Regulatory State of Egypt
Following the assassination of President Sadat in October 1981, President

Mubarak came to power to continue what Sadat had started. No big
ideological changes took place, as more emphasis was put on the impor-
tance of the private sector in leading the economy and the urgency of
addressing the shortcomings of the public sector in order to minimize its
negative impacts on the economy and the public budget. In this regard,
Vignal (2010) has noted that the first step to reform the Egyptian economy
was taken by the former president Sadat, who initiated the open-doors
policy in 1974. This policy gave some fresh impetus to the private sector;
however, in terms of economic development it remained far too modest in
scope and ambition to make any real difference.
The emphasis on the significance of private investments was welcomed
and encouraged by the WB and the IMF as they agree with their prescrip-
tion presented in the form of the Structural Adjustment Plan in 1991 to
reform and revitalize the Egyptian economy (Alissa, 2007). In that sense,

the reform process has been associated from the very beginning with the
deteriorated economic conditions and the intervention of the interna-
tional monetary institutions to structurally reform the Egyptian economy.
The economic reform programme has included a major component of
privatization in terms of selling state-owned enterprises and liberalizing
the utility sectors. The idea was to roll back the frontiers of the Egyptian
state and to encourage the retreat of the state from many economic and
social fields in order to allow more space for the private sector to take the
lead in the area of production and service provision. Contrary to what
was expected, liberalization and privatization during the 1980s and 1990s
have led to a vast growth in the state’s regulatory obligations and marked
a new age of the Egyptian state: the age of the Egyptian regulatory state
(Badran, 2013).
The emergence of the regulatory state in Egypt was quite evident given
the number of independent regulatory authorities created as part of liber-
alization in many utility sectors. The telecoms sector in Egypt is a case in
point. Driven by the need to make credible policy commitments to private
investors domestically and internationally, the Egyptian government
created the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA)
as an independent sector regulator. That was a necessary step for liberal-
izing the sector, given the long history of state monopoly in this area. The
creation of the NTRA was instrumental in that it was devised to encour-
age participation of the private sector in service provision but without
harming the interests of the incumbent Telecom Egypt, which acted for
years as the sector’s sole service provider and regulator at the same time
(Badran, 2011).
The economic reforms enacted by the consecutive governments under
Mubarak’s regime had deep social and economic impacts on the major-
ity of the population in Egypt. As was the case during President Sadat’s
era, few businessmen have succeeded in forging strong ties with the ruling
National Democratic Party (NDP) and the political leadership in the
country. Many of them have occupied influential positions in the parlia-
ment, government and the NDP that enabled them to benefit the most
from the reform process and to maximize their personal profits and rev-
enues at the expense of the masses. A quick look at some of those figures
clearly illustrates how corrupt and unfair the system was. In 1989 Ahmed
Ezz, an Egyptian businessman and the Secretary of Organization in the
former NDP, had $300 000. After joining Mubarak’s administration,
this figure grew to $3 billion. The many different positions occupied by
Ezz in the party, parliament and government enabled him in a relatively
short period of time to control over 60 per cent of the steel market in
Egypt. Other ministers, including former Minister of Housing Ahmed

al-
Maghraby, former Tourism Minister Zuhair Garrana, and former
Minister of Trade and Industry Rashid Mohamed Rashid have had their
fortunes estimated at almost $2 billion (Ramstack, 2011).
In addition to their very close ties with the regime, many businessmen
have also benefited from the way in which the reform process was under-
taken. The implementation of unpopular privatization programmes in
particular was full of deficiencies, corrupt practices and a great lack of
transparency with regard to the ways in which public assets were evalu-
ated and sold to private investors. The revenues from the process of selling
state assets were not used efficiently in investment projects but most prob-
ably used to finance current government activities, which means the loss
of those revenues. Additionally, many employees and workers lost their
jobs because of the downsizing programmes, and joined the long queue of
the unemployed. In short, the rich have become richer and the poor have
become poorer. Under such worsened economic and social conditions, the
Egyptian people revolted against Mubarak’s regime and asked primarily
for bread, social justice, human dignity, and better standards of living.
The Impact of the January 2011 Revolution: Back to the Welfare State
Model?
Mubarak’s regime was unexpectedly brought down by protesters in

February 2011. On 25 January 2011, millions of Egyptians, fuelled by
anger and driven by the regime’s corrupt practices at all social, economic,
and political levels, went out into the streets of Egypt, calling first for
radical changes and reforms, and eventually for the overthrow of the
regime. The success of the revolution took everybody by surprise and the
question became: what to do next? People held great expectations and
high hopes, as is the case with any country after a revolution. Much was
going on in Egypt: vibrant debates about the new Constitution and the
role and responsibilities of different authorities, as well as about individual
freedoms and rights. Presidential elections resulted in the selection of Dr
Mohammed Morsi, the first civilian president of Egypt since 1952, and a
new parliament with a majority of the seats went for the first time to the
Islamists, namely the Muslim Brotherhood.
Because of the incompetence of Morsi’s administration, as it failed to
address the most pressing economic and social issues facing the country,
people went out into the streets again on 30 June and 3 July 2013, but
this time they were backed by the military institution. President Morsi
was ousted from office and a new interim government was selected to run
the country during the transitional phase. Since the January 2011 revolu-
tion and throughout the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood the economic

situation moved from bad to worse. At the time of writing, the interim
government is running an economy with alarming indicators: a budget
deficit that has soared to about $3.2 billion per month; a gross domestic
product (GDP) of 2.2 per cent per year, while a 6 per cent GDP rate is
required to absorb those who search for jobs; a drastic decline in revenues
from oil and gas exports, which have been redirected to meet domestic
demand for energy; an inefficient system of subsidization that costs the
government millions of dollars; a lack of cooperation from the IMF,
which again asked for more reforms that will negatively impact on the
already deteriorated socioeconomic conditions (Werr and Torchia, 2013).
The interim government does not have a clear strategy on how to
address these economic problems. One possible explanation for this is that
the ministers are aware that they do not have a complete mandate from
the people to proceed with radical policies that may backfire on them.
Another possible explanation could be that the interim government try to
avoid unpopular policies which may have negative impacts on the people.
For example, a decision to cut subsidization on fuel will result in a rise in
fuel prices which in turn may push people to protest against the govern-
ment. From this angle, the interim government preferred to throw the ball
into the next elected government’s court. That means, they have decided
to use the easy money they received from the Gulf countries namely Saudi
Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait to provide people with pressing needs in a
welfare form of solution to the persistent economic problems. This strat-
egy might work in the short run, nonetheless, in the long run that is not
a sustainable way to deal with the weakened economy of Egypt. Most of
the aids that Egypt has received from the Gulf States come in the form of
loans which have to be paid back with the required interest. That means
more economic burdens in the medium and long run. At the same time,
going back to the welfare state model with a centralized economy and a
state-led public sector does not appear to be a plausible option.
The discussion so far has indicated that the perceived role of the state
and in turn public administration in the Egyptian society has changed at
different points in history in an attempt to respond to ideological shifts
and sometimes changes in the political leadership. The common denomi-
nator among all political regimes even since the creation of the first central
state in Egypt was the instrumental utilization of public administration
and the intertwining of administrative reforms and reforms in other areas,
especially the economy. To put it another way, the Egyptian public admin-
istration has always been regarded as a means for delivering broader
socioeconomic reforms in society and not as an end in itself. Regardless of
the ideological orientation of the political regime, the role of the Egyptian
bureaucratic elite and public organizations in realizing the intended

developmental goals was highly emphasized by the political leadership.

Therefore developing and reforming bureaucracy in Egypt was a means to
facilitate capital accumulation and development as well as improving the
competitiveness of the entire economy (CIPE, 2010).
THE EGYPTIAN BUREAUCRACY: DIAGNOSING

THE MALADIES
Examination of the Egyptian bureaucracy reveals that since the very

beginning of the central state in Egypt the performance record of the
bureaucratic units was not very impressive. The administrative system in
Egypt has shown symptoms of numerous managerial maladies that can be
described as chronic. The reason for this is that, in spite of the different
initiatives to reform and modernize the Egyptian public administration,
the results of such reforms in terms of their ability to address manage-
rial and administrative problems of the public sector in Egypt were quite
modest. Discussing the problems of the public sector in Egypt in detail
goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Therefore, in this section the major
problems will be briefly highlighted as an introduction to the discussion of
reform initiatives in the section to follow.
From a structural point of view, the way in which the administrative
apparatus in Egypt is organized has greatly contributed to the problems
and shortcomings highlighted in this section. The main characteristics
of the Egyptian bureaucracy are summarized by Sayed (2004) as being
hierarchical, centralized and mechanistic. Rigid hierarchical relationships
exist among the different levels of the bureaucratic machine, with decision-
making authority at the top managerial levels. As mechanistic entities,
public organizations in Egypt include top–down communication channels
to transfer orders from the central authority with clearly defined rules and
standard operating procedures. As put by Lunenburg (2012: 50), mecha-
nistic organizations are characterized by ‘a rigid hierarchy; high levels of
formalization; a heavy reliance on rules, policies, and procedures; vertical
specialization; centralized decision making; downward communication
flows; and narrowly defined tasks’. Although they are designed to be
efficient, these organizational features of mechanistic organizations have
resulted in practice in many shortcomings and problems.
A major issue for running hierarchical, centralized and mechanistic
bureaucracies is the lack of coordination and the inevitable overlapping
between administrative units. Structural overlapping can be noted among
different ministries and governmental units in Egypt. For instance, the
Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources intersects with the Ministry

of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. The same can be said about the
Ministry of Petroleum and the General Authority of Petroleum, as well
as the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration and the Ministry of
Administrative Development. Added to this, the existence of different
supreme monitoring and supervisory bodies with reporting requirements
and mechanisms from lower-level organizations has added to the com-
plexity and rigidity of the Egyptian administrative system and made the
task of coordinating its activities almost impossible (Sayed, 2004).
Composition-wise, as is the case in various countries, the government
of Egypt is the largest employer in the country. According to the Central
Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), the number
of public sector employees reached 5.1 million in the 2011/12 fiscal year
(CAPMAS, 2013, www.capmas.gov.eg). This fairly large number of
employees has always been an obstacle in the face of any reform efforts.
As public employees, those who work for the public sector in Egypt are
very well protected by different laws and regulations that guarantee their
prerogatives and make them untouchable in many situations. This has
influenced the way in which those employees perceive their role in relation
to the public they are supposed to serve. They are most likely to look at
themselves as masters who rule through their public offices and bureaux.
They are the people with power who can make things happen; they are
in office for life, regardless of their performance, and they work for the
government and not for citizens or anyone else.
This understanding of the role of public administration has resulted in
the creation and reinforcement of authoritarian organizational culture
wherein public employees normally look up to their superiors in the
hierarchy and try superficially to comply with their orders. Such a nega-
tive attitude has been reinforced by the central and hierarchical nature of
the bureaucracy and the overall authoritarian and paternalistic nature of
Egyptian society. In this context, Sayed (2004: 12) has noted that
In a large bureaucracy with a promotion system based on seniority rather than
performance, basic monthly salaries ranging from USD 35 to USD 70, and
supplementary payments controlled by senior management, employees are
encouraged to be in the good books of their superiors.
Employees must show respect to their superiors, who in turn have the right
to decide on their remuneration and also have the authority to deprive
them of other privileges. There is no place for consumers or citizens in this
obedience chain, simply because citizens have no power to harm public
employees’ status or to hold them accountable for their misconduct.
Obedient employees always receive the support of their managers, even if
they were wrong or delivered poor services to the citizens.

Such an authoritarian organizational culture, along with the absence

of accountability mechanisms and the lack of transparency, has made
corruption and favouritism the name of the game in the Egyptian
public sector. Inefficient delivery of public services and the image of
the all-powerful public employee have forced many people to engage in
corrupt practices such as bribes in order to get their jobs done properly.
Despite the difficulty of measuring the exact degree of corruption in the
Egyptian administrative system, given the secretive nature of corrupt prac-
tices, international organizations, including Transparency International,
Global Integrity and the Heritage Foundation, have acknowledged the
widespread corruption in Egypt, particularly over the last two decades
(OECD, 2009). The 2013 annual Corruption Perceptions Index issued by
Transparency International indicated that Egypt dropped six places (118
out of 176 countries) as levels of bribery, abuse of power and secret deal-
ings remain high in the Egyptian administrative system (Transparency
International, 2013). Most of the corrupt practices, however, take place in
the low-level bureaucracy, with a noticeable decline in high-level corrup-
tion among ministers and senior civil servants (Aziz and Clinger, 2013).
Petty corruption among public employees has been facilitated by the
lack of democratic governance and the absence of internal monitoring
and accountability mechanisms. As reported by CIPE (2010: 19), ‘The
absence of democracy, public scrutiny, properly qualified civil servants,
and increasing centralization has made corruption rampant’. A major
contributing factor to the spread of corruption at that level is the jungle of
laws and regulations resulting from the accumulative reform efforts and
initiatives. Many archaic laws and regulations are in place, which add to
the ambiguity of the legal and regulatory environment of the Egyptian
public sector. To give an example, there are more than 40 different laws
and regulations and no fewer than 55 decrees regulating the government
employees’ pay system (El-Baradei and Abdelahmid, 2010: 62). Such an
ambiguous legal and regulatory environment gives corrupt employees
the opportunity to twist and manipulate laws and regulations in a way
that complicates the administrative processes and the processes of service
delivery. The regulatory burden goes directly to citizens, who have to pay
bribes to get their work done.
In addition to the absence of good governance, in terms of accountability
and transparency in the processes of public administration, which greatly
contribute to the spread of corrupt practices, other important factors
should also be underlined in this respect. Chief among these is the low salary
and low remuneration scale of public employees. This is not to say that
receiving a low salary justifies corrupt practices, but it is important to refer
to that issue as an explanatory factor in why public employees seek benefits

from public office. Although minimum wages are guaranteed by law, public
employees’ payments do not allow them to meet their basic needs as they are
most likely to fall under the national poverty line. In this regard, the CIPE
(2010: 16) has reported that ‘civil servants suffer from extremely low sala-
ries compared to the constant growth in prices of products and services’. In
the same vein, El-Baradei and Abdelahmid (2010: 63) have stated that ‘the
lower bound entry salary for a civil servant at grade 6 is LE 35 per month
in 2008’. After adding bonuses, this figure jumps to LE 289 per month; nev-
ertheless, the growing inflation rates in addition to the devaluation of the
Egyptian pound and the continued increase in prices reduce the purchasing
power of public employees and flatten their real wages (Sayed, 2004).
This issue becomes more complicated if one considers the difference
between the minimum and the maximum levels of income in the public
sector; it can be complicated even more if we look at the discrepancies
among public organizations and across sectors. Just comparing the pay-
ments received by public employees working for central ministries such as
the Ministry of Finance with what local authority employees might get can
highlight a huge gap in incomes (CIPE, 2010). Addressing the low salary
of public employees has always been an issue for the consecutive govern-
ments of Egypt. Because of the large size of the public sector, initiating
any shape of reform in this area will definitely have a detrimental impact
on the public budget. A one-pound monthly increase in public employ-
ees’ salaries means an increase of over 5 million pounds per month in the
public budget, as mentioned by Zaki Abu-Amer, the former minister of
administrative development (Abu-Amer, 2001).
The low salary and low remuneration scales of public employees have
been worsened by the deteriorated physical working environment of
public organizations. A visit to one of the public organizations, particu-
larly in rural areas and districts other than Cairo and Alexandria, can tell
an analyst a great deal about the shortage of resources, in the physical
sense, of those organizations. Old furniture, antique computers, if any,
overstaffed offices, and of course unsatisfied employees, is the norm in
public offices in Egypt. As reported by Sayed (2004: 9), in Upper Egypt
‘16% of office buildings are considered hazardous, 18% do not have tel-
ephone connections, and 6% do not have access to water, sanitation or
electrical energy’. The poor working environment and lack of resources
affect the way in which public employees deal with the citizens and the way
they deliver their services.
Combined with low salaries, poor working conditions have resulted
in a deterioration of the social status of the public employees in society.
Although it is prohibited by law to combine public employment with any
other work during non-working hours unless permitted (Law 47, 1978:

articles 11–12), it is quite common to find a public employee who drives a

taxi or works in a restaurant or in any other private venue in order to earn
extra money to compensate for the low salary received from the govern-
ment. In this context, an analysis of the responses of 100 employees inter-
viewed by El-Baradei and Abdelahmid (2010: 68) indicated that 82 per cent
of respondents were not staisfied with their monthly pay and 97 per cent
thought that monthly pay is not compatible with the market value of wages
and salaries. Any explanation of the demoralization of public values and
low productivity of the Egyptian civil service should underline these factors.
Another human resources issue in Egyptian public organizations is
related to the appraisal system and the way in which employees’ perfor-
mance is evaluated. In this regard, Maher (2011: 399) has noted that ‘the
whole evaluation system is highly subjective, since 99% of employees
receive “excellent” grades regardless of their performance which may
lead to the deterioration of the performance system among government
employees’. According to Maher, the assessors themselves lack the very
basic skills required for conducting performance evaluation and appraisal.
Added to this, seniority and not necessarily performance is the major factor
to be taken into account when promoting public employees. Sayed (2004)
has attributed the existence of such a flawed evaluation and appraisal
system to the weak financial incentives and rewards in the public sector.
From her perspective, the assessors try to compensate public employees
for the absence of substantial financial rewards for their achievements by
grading them ‘excellent’ or giving a score of 90 per cent or above in order
to facilitate their promotion to higher positions.
The negative organizational culture of the Egyptian public sector has
also been reflected in the lack of trust among the different levels of the
organizational pyramid. Those at the bottom of the pyramid do not trust
senior civil servants and top bureaucrats who, according to their view,
treat them as scapegoats to cover their failures and incompetence in
running their organizations. In this regard, Sayed (2004) has mentioned
that middle and junior staff always cast doubt on the intentions of top
management and their reform initiatives. They normally look at them as
the sole beneficiary of these reforms. Additionally, the close relationships
between top management and senior civil servants on the one hand and
politicians on the other increase such doubts and make public employees
suspicious about the real intent and goals of reform.
Having identified and briefly discussed what can be described as the
chronic maladies of the Egyptian bureaucracy, and without making any
claim that what has been debated so far provides an exhaustive list of
public sector problems in Egypt, the next section will focus on the reform
initiatives and the government’s efforts to address the highlighted issues.

THE EGYPTIAN BUREAUCRACY: REFORM

INITIATIVES
Administrative reform in Egypt has been launched under different slogans

such as ‘an administrative revolution’, ‘shaking up the government insti-
tutions’, or ‘demolishing the failing routine’ (CIPE, 2010). As indicated
above, the reform of public administration should be regarded as a part
of an overall reform project to improve social and economic conditions
in Egypt. The message was pretty clear that the bureaucratic body of
the state suffers from different illnesses and there is a pressing need to
find a remedy in order to treat these problems. The implementation of
the reform, none the less, as well as the delivery methods, results and
outcomes, were controversial issues, as will be indicated later in this
section.
Given the complex and overlapping nature of the problems facing public
sector organizations, it would be an oversimplification to expect that there
is a medicine that can cure all these long-standing illnesses at once. A
gradual approach has been followed by different consecutive governments
in an attempt to solve the problems of the public sector. Different reform
initiatives have been launched and efforts have been made to improve
the structural as well as the functional aspects of the Egyptian public
administration. At the structural level, the OECD (2010) has reported
that Egypt has taken important steps towards solving the issue of overlap
among public organizations. According to the report, a programme has
been launched to review the functions of existing public administration
units in order to assess the roles they play and the functions they deliver to
society. Redundant functions and duplication are to be eliminated in order
to improve coordination and cooperation among public organizations as
well as to enhance complementarity among their activities. The report also
underlined efforts to simplify administrative procedures and create a good
legal and regulatory environment.
The Egyptian Regulatory Reform and Development Activity
(ERRADA) is a case in a point in this regard. This initiative started in
2008 in an attempt to open a dialogue between public and private organi-
zations in order to come up with an effective regulatory framework. To
this end, ERRADA has undertaken different activities to address the
issues related to the multiplicity of complex and overlapping regula-
tions: lack of clarity of valid regulations; absence of a system to identify
implicitly repealed decrees; overlap of authorities issuing regulations;
inconsistency in the regulation drafting cycle across ministries; and the
lack of specific mechanisms to study the economic impact of new regula-
tions (ERRADA, www.errada.gov.eg). Despite the good efforts exerted

by the initiative to improve the regulatory environment, the scope of this

exercise is still considerably limited given the size of the Egyptian bureau-
cracy. Only ten ministries were involved at the initial stage; however, it
would be good practice to extend the activities of ERRADA to other
ministries and administrative units.
The Egyptian government has also embarked on a programme to
improve the process of service delivery and the quality of provided ser-
vices using e-governance. The idea was to promote innovative solutions to
service delivery problems, to achieve customer satisfaction internally and
externally, and to improve decision-making capacity by providing solid
and up-to-date evidence to decision-makers. As reported by the Ministry
of State for Administrative Development (MSAD) (2010: 9),
ICT is the main tool that is used to develop the two dimensions of government
services ‘front and back ends’. Using ICT enables better efficiency and simple
government services, and allows for 24 hours services throughout the country
via various delivery channels and models.
Different models of e-government have been communicated and several

international agreements have been signed with countries such as France,
South Korea, Slovenia, Malaysia and India to learn from their experiences
in e-governance. The Egyptian Government Services Portal was launched
in 2004, supported by an advanced search engine that allows bilingual
search and provides access to 700 informational and 100 transactional
services. For better usability purposes, a new version of the portal was
launched in 2008. Following a citizen-centric approach, the government
established a Citizens Relationship Management (CRM) system in 2009.
The system aims at maintaining and managing citizens’ complaints, sug-
gestions and inquiries. The efforts of e- government applications can
also be seen in creating electronic databases and smart cards in order to
deal with problems in areas such as intergovernmental cooperation and
subsidization policies.
Despite such efforts to integrate ICT in service delivery and the busi-
nesses of government institutions in general, the overall proration of
government organizations using ICT is still low. A quick look at the
e-Government Readiness Index 2004, which underlines the ‘generic capac-
ity or aptitude of the public sector to use ICT for encapsulating in public
services and deploying to the public, high quality information (explicit
knowledge) and effective communication tools that support human devel-
opment’ (DPADM, 2004: 15), reveals that, in comparsion with other
countries in the region such as Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, Egypt’s
efforts in this area look pretty humble; see Figure 7.1.
In response to such a limited utilization of ICT by government

e-Government Readiness Index
0.40
0.35
0.30
0.25
0.20
0.15
0.10
0.05
0
Egypt
Algeria
Libya AJ
Morocco
Sudan
Tunisia
Source: United Nations (2003).
Figure 7.1 e-Government Readiness Index
institutions, MSAD has started an awareness campaign to educate public

managers about the usefulness of using such technologies and the positive
impacts of their utilization on customer satisfaction and organizational
performance. Thanks to such efforts, in addition to improvements at the
infrastructure level and in relation to citizens’ participation, the rank of
Egypt has improved in the 2012 index, in which Egypt was ranked second
after Tunisia; see Figure 7.2.
A comparison of Figures 7.1 and 7.2 indicates that between 2004 and
2012 Egypt succeeded in closing the gap separating its e-government
from the leading North African countries. In fact, it succeeded in coming
before Algeria and Morocco and very close to Tunisia. Another major
component in the reform initiatives focuses on creating a more account-
able, more transparent and less corrupt public sector through embracing
the notion of good governance. As reported by Egypt Independent (2012),
‘Corruption ranging from the petty to the grand scale was one of the main
grievances that toppled Mubarak’. Despite the fact that Egypt has more
or less succeeded in stabilizing its economy during the last two decades,
very little has been done to fight corruption and promote good govern-
ance principles (see Alissa, 2007). A gap could be spotted in this regard
between the official positions of the consecutive governments, which have
all been in favour of more transparency and less corrupt practices in the

0.50
0.45
0.40
0.35
0.30
0.25
0.20
0.15
0.10
0.05
0
Tunisia Egypt Morocco Algeria Sudan South
Sudan
Source: Based on the UN 2012 e-Government Readiness Index.
Figure 7.2 E-government development
public sector, and what was going on on the ground as different forms of
corruption were taking place at different levels.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, the process of administrative reform in Egypt has been

analysed from a political-economy perspective in an attempt to underline
the major changes in the role of the Egyptian state in society and the asso-
ciated changes in the role of public administration. Three main models
have been identified: the welfare; mixed-economy; and regulatory. Under
each model the role of the state has been redefined in the light of the ideo-
logical orientation of the political regime. In turn, the role of the public
sector has also changed from being the leading driver of economic devel-
opment under the welfare-state model to becoming one among other non-
state actors involved in forming and implementing public policies under
the mixed-economy model and to a greater extent under the regulatory

model. A common feature among the three models is that they all consider
the Egyptian bureaucracy as a means for achieving economic and social
ends. Consequently, the Egyptian bureaucracy has always been at the
centre of any reform project.
In spite of the many reform initiatives to modernize Egyptian public
administration, the Egyptian bureaucracy has developed many persistent
maladies that defied reforms. Over the years, some of those problems
have become chronic and difficult to solve. The chapter has highlighted
some of those problems, including structural and functional overlapping,
as well as the deterioration in the working conditions and demoralization
of public values. In response to those problems the Egyptian government
initiated several programmes to improve the legal and regulatory environ-
ment for businesses, in addition to developing innovative ways to deliver
better services at higher levels of quality using ICT and e-government
applications.
Overall, the discussion and analysis of the political economy of adminis-
trative reform initiatives in Egypt indicates that the Egyptian bureaucracy
does not lack expertise or skills, given the high qualifications of most of the
public employees, particularly those who occupy senior positions. Added
to this, senior managers have always welcomed reform initiatives and
supported innovative practices. The problem, however, springs from the
way in which public sector reform initiatives have been implemented. The
ability of senior civil servants to communicate the reform messages and to
emphasize the importance of reforms and their positive impacts to middle
and front-line managers, let alone the rest of the employees, was limited.
Furthermore, most of the reform initiatives come from the senior civil
servants and top bureaucrats and follow a top–down approach without
real participation from middle and lower management. This top–down
approach to enacting public sector reforms, in addition to the exclusion
of employees from decision-making processes, normally results in lack of
ownership of the reform project. In this context, public employees tend to
perceive reform initiatives as benefiting senior managers and politicians
while adding to the burdens of employees. They also look at such reforms
as cosmetic and as not resulting in real change on the ground.
REFERENCES
Abu-Amer, Z. (2001). Development not unemployment. Ahram Weekly Online: http://

weekly.ahram.org.eg/.
Ahram Online (2013). Egypt’s interim president is swearing in first government, 16 July.
Alissa, S. (2007). The Political Economy of Reform in Egypt: Understanding the Role of
Institutions. Carnegie Middle East Centre.

AllAfrica (2013). Egypt: Shura Council cancelled in New Constitution. http://allafrica.com/

stories/201311081787.html.
Ayubi, N.N. (1991). The State and Public Policies in Egypt Since Sadat. Reading: Ithaca.
Aziz, S. and Clinger, D. (2013). Egypt’s corruption woes. CNNWORLD: http://globalpub-
licsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/08/egypts-corruption-woes/.
Badran, A. (2011). The Regulatory Management of Privatised Public Utilities: A Network
Perspective on the Regulatory Process in the Egyptian Telecommunications Market. VDM
Verlag Dr. Müller.
Badran, A. (2013). Understanding the Egyptian regulatory state: independent regulators in
theory and practice. In N.K. Dubash and B. Morgan (eds), The Rise of the Regulatory
State of the South: Infrastructure and Development in Emerging Economies. Oxford: Oxford
Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) (2013). http://www.
capmas.gov.eg/.
CIPE (2010). Tackling the Leviathan: Reforming Egyptian Bureaucracy for Improved
Economic Growth. Cairo: CIPE.
Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt (1971). Retrieved from http://www.sis.gov.eg/
En/Templates/Articles/tmpArticles.aspx?CatID5208.
DPADM (2004). The Arab Republic of Egypt Public Administration Country Profile. UN:
Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM).
Egypt Independent (2012). Egypt slips in corruption index despite Arab Spring. http://www.
egyptindependent.com/news/egypt-slips-corruption-index-despite-arab-spring.
Egyptian Regulatory Reform and Development Activity (ERRADA) (2013). Retrieved from
http://www.errada.gov.eg/index_en.php?op5about_us_en, 11 December.
El-Baradei, L. and Abdelahmid, D. (2010). Reforming the pay system for government
employees in Egypt. International Public Management Review, 59–87.
Kirkpatrick, D. (2012). Egyptian Islamists approve draft constitution despite objections. The
New York Times, 29 November.
Lunenburg, F. (2012). Mechanistic–organic organizations – an axiomatic theory: authority
based on bureaucracy or professional norms. International Journal of Scholarly Academic
Intellectual Diversity, 50–62.
Maher, A. (2011). Reforming government employees’ performance appraisal system in New
Egypt. Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences, 399–401.
MSAD (2010). Ministry of State for Administrative Development 2010–2012 Work plan.
Cairo: MSAD.
OECD (2009). Business climate development strategy. http://www.oecd.org/daf/psd/
46341460.pdf.
OECD (2010). Background note on the state of economic and governance reforms. http://www.
oecd.org/countries/egypt/40252444.pdf.
Ramstack, T. (2011). Obama optimistic about Egypt as negotiators make concessions. All
Headline News: http://archive.is/g47JZ.
Sayed, F. (2004). Innovation in Public Administration: The Case of Egypt. New York: UN
DESA.
Transparency International (2013). Corruption perceptions index. http://www.transparency.
org/research/cpi/overview.
Vignal, L. (2010). Reforming Egypt? Fifteen years of EU–Egypt cooperation from the
Association Agreement to the European Neighbourhood Policy. RAMSES working
papers: http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/esc/ramses/ramsespaperVignal.pdf.
Werr, P. and Torchia, A. (2013). New Egypt government may promote welfare, not eco-
nomic reform. REUTERS: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/17/us-egypt-economy-
policy-analysis-idUSBRE96G0IP20130717.

8. The Canadian public service: in search of
a new equilibrium
Donald J. Savoie
INTRODUCTION
The Canadian public service has been buffeted about in recent years by a
variety of forces. Globalization, the desire of politicians to grab hold of
the policy-making levers and to become less dependent on career public
servants for policy advice, and the push to have public sector manag-
ers emulate their private sector counterparts have knocked the public
service off its traditional moorings. Politicians in Canada, like those in
other Anglo-American democracies, have and continue to run against the
status quo, entrenched government and whatever else stands in the way of
change. Bureaucracy has often been the target.
It is against this backdrop that this chapter takes stock of the state
of the Canadian public service. In Canada, the public service has been
asked to keep pace with the private sector, as it struggles to compete in
an increasingly competitive environment. At the same time, the govern-
ment has introduced one measure after another and one oversight body
after another to ensure greater transparency in government operations.
As mentioned above, the Canadian public service has been knocked off
its traditional moorings in recent years. Canadian politicians, like their
other Anglo-American counterparts, decided some 30 years ago to grab
hold of the policy-making levers and to push public servants to become
better managers and to look to the private sector for guidance. The rise of
the global economy and the politics of fiscal squeeze have had a profound
impact on the work of Canadian public servants. The chapter reviews the
ambitious reform measures and other developments that have reshaped
the Canadian public service. It seeks to answer a number of questions –
what role does the public service play in shaping new policy; what has been
the impact of various management reform efforts; and how have public
servants been able to square various contradictory messages directed at
them? It concludes with an assessment of what now and how the Canadian
public service, as an institution, can move towards a new equilibrium.
182

The Canadian public service 183
RUNNING AGAINST THE STATUS QUO
Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 proved to be a seminal

moment in the development of Western bureaucracies. The elec-
tion of other right- of-
centre politicians, Ronald Reagan in 1980,
and Brian Mulroney in Canada in 1984, sent a clear signal that the
status quo was no longer acceptable. Thatcher once declared that she
disliked public servants as a breed; Reagan said that he was going to
Washington to drain the swamp; and Mulroney pledged that, if elected,
he would give pink slips and running shoes to the bureaucrats (Savoie,
1994).
They had an agenda – cut government down to size, bring a distinct
Conservative agenda to policy making, hold the upper hand in shaping
new policies and direct senior public servants to concentrate their efforts
on the boiler room of government operations. They set out to turn gov-
ernment administrators into public sector managers with a bias for action.
If senior public servants could not come up with ways to become better
managers, then they should look to their private sector counterparts for
inspiration and guidance. If there was no bottom line in government, then
public servants were told to come up with one.
The notion that government managers should emulate their private
sector counterparts has not lost its political currency in recent years. It will
be recalled, for example, that Tony Blair made it clear, time and again,
that the private sector was key to improving management in government.1
In Canada, prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and now Stephen
Harper have all sung the praises of private sector management practices
and said that government managers should borrow best practices from
business (Savoie, 2013).
The above makes the point that the Canadian public service has been
buffeted by several powerful forces. They include: politicians determined
to take charge of policy making and to put public servants in their place;
a new approach to management; globalization and sustained efforts to
make government operations more transparent.
GLOBALIZATION
Jan Aart Scholte (1997: 439) explains that one consequence of globaliza-
tion has been the “detachment of money from territorial space”. It is now
widely accepted that those national economies that do not adjust to the
requirements of the global economy will suffer. National governments
protect their home businesses at their peril, making them uncompetitive

over time. In brief, globalization has “deterriolized” economic power

(Beck, 2007).
Globalization has also been felt in the public sector. Ideas on new
approaches to management move around quickly and national govern-
ments will latch on to them for fear of being left behind. New public
management (NPM) is a case in point. It started in Britain and within
several years had spread to the other Anglo- American democracies.
Underpinning NPM is the view that private sector management practices
are superior to those found in government.
With the rise of globalization came the notion that the private sector
knows best. Henry Mintzberg (1996) summed it up well when he observed
that “Capitalism has triumphed”. He added: “that was the pat conclusion
reached in the West as, one by one, the Communist regimes of Eastern
Europe began to fall. It has become such an article of faith that we have
become blind to its effects” (Mintzberg, 1996: 75). Mintzberg’s point was
that too many lumped everything together and concluded that the collapse
of communism showed that capitalism and the private sector were supe-
rior in every way to the public sector and government (Mintzberg, 1996).
The business community may well see merits in globalization and
applaud efforts to “deterriolized” economic power. However, national
politics remains essentially about space. Tip O’Neill’s often- repeated
quote, “all politics is local”, rings as true today as it did when he first made
the observation after he ran for a Cambridge Council seat in 1935 (Farrell,
2001: 21). Public administration is also defined by space but it is essentially
about organizations, hierarchy, sectors and programs. Though they are
still left to pick up the pieces when things go wrong, presidents and prime
ministers understand better than anyone how and why political power has
drifted downward and outward from national governments. They have
first-hand knowledge that there is less “loose” power around national gov-
ernments than was the case 30 years ago. More to the point, power inside
national governments is not as evident as it once was.
The above explains, at least in part, why presidents and prime ministers
have come to believe that the levers of political power do not work as well
as they would like or as they once did. It may well also explain why they
want to centralize power in their own hands. In any event, they reason that
it is the only way to get things done in modern government. It may also
explain why British, Australian and Canadian prime ministers have put in
place two policy processes – one for themselves and another for everybody
else. When they take an interest in a policy initiative, things get done, but
when they do not, an elaborate and consultative policy process takes over
and it takes an inordinate amount of time to strike a decision. The same
can be said for the French and the US presidents (Dahlström et al., 2011).

ON POLICY: WHEN 2 1 2 CAN EQUAL 5
The market for policy advice in government in the post-positivism era is

not nearly as clear as it was 30 to 40 years ago (see, e.g., Fischer, 2003).
The market for policy analysis, where public policy problems could be
reviewed scientifically (positivism) and where hypotheses could be pre-
pared and tested through rigorous statistical analysis, has been on the
defensive since the 1980s.
Public servants brought to Canada’s national capital the knowledge
they had acquired in the social sciences. They emphasized empirical
research designs, the use of surveys and sampling techniques, proper
data-gathering procedures and they produced input–output studies, cost–
benefit analyses, and developed socioeconomic models with predictive
power (see, among others, Weiss, 1990). If politicians and politics could
not understand this, then politics itself was seen as the problem. The
Thatcher era, the rise of neoconservatism, and the determination of poli-
ticians to grab the policy agenda and shape it to their wishes put senior
public servants and their more formal policy-making processes on the
defensive. Today, politicians, when developing public policy, take into
consideration ideology, partisan concerns, the pressures of the day and the
ever-watchful media. One senior Industry Canada official explained, “We
have reached the point where two plus two can now make five.”2
Senior public servants have adjusted. Canadian political scientist Peter
Aucoin wrote about their habit of “demonstrating enthusiasm” for the
government’s agenda, either as a tactic to advance their own personal
careers or in the mistaken notion that neutral public servants should all be,
as one British scholar put it, “promiscuously partisan” – that is, partisan
to the government of the day but willing to change when a different party
takes over (Aucoin, 2004). They are more likely to do this if they have
served in various central agencies and departments rather than in a single
department, where they are able to gain a thorough understanding of a
sector or policy field.
Don Drummond, a former senior government of Canada public servant,
praised former clerk of the Privy Council Jocelyne Bourgon for rebuild-
ing the policy units in departments after they had been “weakened” in the
1994–97 program review exercise. The policy units, together with program
evaluation and internal audit units, were indeed rebuilt between 2000 and
2010, when a substantial number of new positions was added to them. But
this did not prevent Drummond in 2011 from writing about the govern-
ment’s dismal policy capacity (Drummond, 2011: 345). Drummond (ibid.:
337) wrote about the loss of the “analytical discipline” in government that
“combined rigour in theory and quantitative methods”. He maintains that

important policy shifts in recent years on such policy issues as immigra-

tion and environment have not been accompanied by policy analyses of
the kind produced for the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement and the
introduction of the goods and services tax (ibid.: 338).
The high-profile Munir Sheikh case speaks to the new order in the
Canadian public service. Sheikh, the former chief statistician for Canada,
fell on his sword over the government’s decision to cancel the long-form
census and replace it with a voluntary survey. Shortly after the govern-
ment announced that the 2011 census would include only the short form,
a chorus of protests erupted from 370 groups across Canada opposed to
the decision. The government responded by arguing that it did not wish
to secure information by threatening to send Canadians to jail for failing
to fill out the census. The minister responsible for Statistics Canada
explained that the government wanted to strike a proper balance in getting
the needed data and the citizens’ desire to maintain privacy.3 Sheikh later
pointed out that Statistics Canada had worked well with the Office of the
Privacy Commissioner and there were no issues of violating privacy in
gathering census data.4
Sheikh resigned after the minister announced that the quality of the
voluntary survey data would be as good as that of the long-form census
and that both he and Statistics Canada were behind this decision. Sheikh
felt that media stories on the matter were damaging the reputation of
Statistics Canada and that they cast doubt on his own integrity.5 He later
was adamant that a voluntary survey and a short form can never be a
substitute for a mandatory long-form census.6
Sheikh has recently asked a number of questions that remain unan-
swered. The questions go to the heart of post-positivism and the loss of
influence of senior public servants in shaping public policy. They include:
did the government analyse carefully the consequences of a loss in data
quality as a result of the voluntary survey? Did it consider how this loss in
quality would affect the data needs of users? Did it examine the negative
consequences of this on policy development, including that at the federal
level? In undertaking such an analysis, why did the government not consult
with data users? Did it compare these consequences from the loss of data
quality against any privacy gains?7 In a world where 2 1 2 can equal 5, there
is little need to answer these questions. Sheikh is still waiting for answers.
Research institutes, think-tanks and lobby groups have also had a pro-
found impact on the policy work of public servants. Politicians can now
turn to a host of research institutes to get the answers they are looking for
on any policy issue. These cover the full political spectrum, from left to
right. Should this tactic fail, politicians can turn to the 2000 or so lobbyists
working in the national capital who are always at the ready to promote

their clients’ perspective. There are even lobbyists working to promote the
interests of the tobacco industry. If policy truths are not absolute, elected
politicians now have any number of sources to consult to establish truths
as they wish to hear them (Savoie, 2008: 156).
The role of permanent career officials in policy making some 30 years
ago was to search for relevant information, analyse it, and provide advice
to politicians on the government side. Information and data were not then
readily accessible (see, e.g., Fischer, 1998: 129–46). Today, one can Google
any policy issue and quickly obtain the relevant information. If policy
making in a post-positivism world is a matter of opinion, where 2 1 2
can equal 5, Google searches may well provide any answer a politician is
looking for.8
Google search is a profoundly democratic instrument. It opens up the
policy-making field to anyone who is interested. Allan Gregg (2011) put it
very well when he wrote,
Feeling more knowledgeable, connected and in control of our personal lives

has also directly reduced our reliance on authority. As a result, we have little
incentive to uncritically swallow the claims of political leaders who don’t seem
to understand our concerns, share our experiences or speak in a way we find
authentic. Our political leaders have not only failed to adjust to this new reality,
they also avoid honestly and directly engaging on our most pressing issues.
He could have added that senior public servants have also failed to adjust
or have not been allowed to adjust.
Still, old habits die hard in government, as students of institutionalism
and path dependency have often observed. Public servants who wish to
make it to the top know that the ability to avoid controversy and negative
attention to their ministers and their departments, combined with a capac-
ity to promote the policy preferences of the prime minister’s court and to
defend their department’s interest – or, more often, that of central agen-
cies in interdepartmental committee meetings – are what truly matters. In
brief, the ability to work the “thick” process-oriented Ottawa system is
what counts for the ambitious public servant. Management is still left to
the less gifted, to those not able to make it to the top (Savoie, 1994: 175).
General Lewis MacKenzie claims that the ability to work the Ottawa
system has now become a major factor for promotion, even within the
military:
Regrettably, the mastery of the Ottawa game became one of the criteria, if not
the key criterion, for selection as the Chief of Defence Staff. This reinforced
the opinion of field soldiers that senior field command was not the route to
follow if one aspired to be CDS – a most unfortunate and uniquely Canadian
development. (Globe and Mail, 1996: A17)

Working well with the centre of government and other departments

requires wide experience in the system and an ability to think in political
(albeit not necessarily partisan) terms and to navigate the upper echelons
of the political–bureaucratic world.
Deputy ministers (i.e. the equivalent of permanent secretaries) in the
government of Canada now spend one hour out of every three on inter-
departmental issues. It is interesting to note that they typically allocate
nearly twice as much time to meetings with their peers as to matters involv-
ing their own ministers (Bourgault, 1997: 21–2). Avoidance of embarrass-
ing disclosures and the ability to manage a controversy have ramped up
spin operations to the point that spin is now central to government opera-
tions and management. Spin is about survival, and surviving in govern-
ment is of course highly valued in both the political and the bureaucratic
worlds (ibid.).
Cyberspace, the social media, 24-hour news channels, “gotcha” journal-
ism, the never-ending call for greater transparency, and the work of offic-
ers of Parliament (the blame generators) all make it extremely difficult, if
not impossible, to have centralized control of sensitive or embarrassing
information (Hood, 2011: 635–8). The solution: beef up the government’s
spin operations to deal with any fallout. Today, there are an estimated
3824 spin specialists or communications staffers in the federal govern-
ment, including about 100 in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy
Council Office. Growth in the number of communications specialists
began in earnest in the early 1980s and has shot up in recent years. There
has been an increase of over 700 positions in the last six years alone.9 Scott
Reid, former director of communications to Prime Minister Paul Martin,
explains:
At the political level, there really were no formal positions known as director
of communications in the early ’90s. By 2003, every minister had both a com-
munications director and a press secretary . . . you saw changes of that kind
happen, all of which are clear indications that the emphasis on communications
was increasing at both the political and bureaucratic level. (Martin, 2011: 33)
No issue is too trivial for senior government officials to ignore in man-

aging blame avoidance. Some observers, including Ralph Heintzman,
have pointed to the “growing involvement of public servants in commu-
nications”, suggesting that they are crossing the line at the highest level,
putting “loyalty to the government of the day above loyalty to the public
interest, and far above loyalty to the values of the very institution they
were charged with leading” (Heintzman, 2010: 6).

MANAGEMENT: EMULATING THE PRIVATE

SECTOR, UP TO A POINT
As noted, regaining the upper hand in shaping policy was only part of the
agenda. Politicians also wanted to transform public service administra-
tors into strong managers and, as noted, they looked to the private sector
for inspiration. It is no exaggeration to state that politicians, on both the
political right and left, have for the past 30 years sought to make the public
sector look like the private sector.
It is a rare document indeed in which the Privy Council Office or the
Treasury Board Secretariat does not employ a business-inspired vocabu-
lary when dealing with management practices in government. Like deputy
ministers, they refer to their “lines of business”, their “business plans” and
their “bottom line”. Starting at the very top, with the clerk of the Privy
Council, we increasingly hear about the “business of government” and
“integrated business plans”.10 They are not alone. In its fifth annual report,
the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service, co-chaired
by former clerk Paul Tellier and former Cabinet Minister David Emerson,
employed the word “business” on 14 occasions in their 11-page report.
Among other things, the committee urged the public service to “transform
the way it does business”, arguing that the “current business model of
fragmented administrative services is inefficient and costly” and that gov-
ernment operates in “a long-cycle business”.11 In its sixth annual report,
the committee urged the government to pursue “a new business model”.12
The desire to look to the private sector for inspiration now permeates
the political and bureaucratic worlds in Ottawa. Indeed, a former senior
federal public servant thinks that things have got out of hand. It is worth
quoting him at length:
Without blushing or even without a second thought, we now talk about our
‘customers’ or ‘clients’ in a way that would not have occurred to public servants
three or four decades ago. And this is just the tip of the iceberg . . . Sometimes
the results of this attempt to reinvent the public sector into the private sector are
quite bizarre. I recently visited a well-meaning colleague who proudly presented
to me the organizational renewal efforts of a high-priced foreign consultant
that consisted in, among other things, the translation of all terms of public
administration and parliamentary democracy into private sector equivalents,
including the reinvention of members of Parliament as the shareholders of the
corporation and Cabinet as the Board of Directors.
In the early 1990s, when NPM came into vogue, a deputy minister
explained at some length what he believed to be the renewal and trans-
formation of his department. “This is really serious stuff,” he exclaimed
proudly. “It’s just like the private sector” (Heintzman, 1999: 7–9).

Table 8.1 Public administration and new public management
Public administration New public management

Old culture New culture
Controlling Empowering
Rigid Flexible
Suspicious Trusting
Administrative Managerial
Secret Open
Power based Task based
Input/process oriented Results oriented
Preprogrammed and repetitive Capable of purposeful action
Risk averse Willing to take intelligent risks
Mandatory Optional
Communicating poorly Communicating well
Centralized Decentralized
Uniform Diverse
Stifling creativity Encouraging innovation
Reactive Proactive
Source: Public Service 2000 Secretariat, Government of Canada (1990).
NPM, it will be recalled, also sought to empower managers by remov-

ing red tape. Red tape, it is argued, belongs to a different era, not to a
modern machinery of government that looks to the private sector for
inspiration. If the private sector can run operations efficiently with a
minimum of red tape, why not the public sector? The Public Service
2000 exercise, which squared nicely with NPM, urged departments to
launch reviews to identify “useless” red tape (Tellier, 1990: 123–32). It
produced a table that compared NPM with “old” public administration
(see Table 8.1).
The table addresses what is wrong with public administration in a fast-
changing global economy. In the eyes of the political leadership, the public
sector had to shed its risk-averse culture and the heavy bureaucratic hand
that inhibited creativity. The public sector had to learn from the private
sector to become more task based and results oriented, and to instil in its
managers a bias for action. By the 1990s, red tape became the symbol of
bureaucratic inefficiencies and had to be attacked.
Red tape is not without some value, however, at least in the public
sector; there was a time when career officials saw a great deal of merit in it
and in due process. Given recent developments, it is worth quoting how a
former deputy minister saw things in 1961:

The Civil Service Commission may be slow and meticulous in the recruit-
ment of staff, but this is because parliament rightly insists upon every citizen
having an equal right to try for a job. Appropriation and allotment controls
may impose on field workers certain delays, but parliamentary control over
expenditures is much more important than these minor inconveniences.
The same applies to controls over individual expenditures: these must be
reported in the Public Accounts in order that parliament might review them,
and a good deal of book-work is justified in making this possible. (Johnson,
1961: 367)
The former deputy minister pointed out that government “supervisors”

have no profit motive to encourage them to streamline work, simplify per-
formance standards and so on; nor should they (ibid.). No deputy minister
would make such a statement today.
To remove red tape at the same time that organizational boundaries
are collapsing is not without implications for the machinery of govern-
ment, particularly for accountability in managing the expenditure budget.
Red tape has served several purposes, including a check on political and
bureaucratic miscues and abuses, as well as numerous checks on the
spending of public money.
DIFFERENT IN BOTH IMPORTANT AND

UNIMPORTANT WAYS
Attempts to make the public sector look like the private sector have been
misguided and costly to taxpayers. The genius of the private sector is its
capacity to generate creative destruction where innovation and new firms
attract resources from old ones. The private sector has a clear bottom line
that tells essentially all that needs to be told about a firm’s success. The
genius of the public sector is that it is inclusive and that it gives life to
democracy (Jacobs, 1992).
In short, the main difference between the public and private sector is
that the private sector manages to the bottom line, while the public sector
manages to the top line (Wilson, 1989). Government agencies – to a far
greater degree than private businesses – must serve goals or purposes
that are not always the preferences of the agency’s senior administrators.
Wilson explains, “control over revenues, productive factors and agency
goals are all vested to an important degree in entities external to the
organization – legislatures, courts, politicians, and interest groups” (ibid.).
The result is that government officials will often look to the demands of
the “external entities” rather than down the organization. It is for this
reason, Wilson argues, that government managers are driven by the

c onstraints on the organization, not by its tasks, and that public sector
managers will invariably manage to the top line.
It does not matter much in the private sector if you only get it right
60 percent of the time, provided you secure a larger share of the market
and you are able to turn a handsome profit. It does not matter much in
government if you get it right 99 percent of the time if the 1 percent entails
high-profile negative media attention for the government for an extended
period of time. Efforts to borrow management practices from the private
sector overlook the reality that public and private sectors are fundamen-
tally different in both important and unimportant ways. Management in
the private sector is about competition, securing a larger market share and
the bottom line. Management in the public sector is in large measure about
blame avoidance.
There are two management cultures currently in play in the Canadian
government, and they view the world from vastly different perspectives.
One looks up and is concerned primarily with the policy process, with min-
isters, central agencies, Question Period, and the senior public service. The
other looks down and out – to citizens, clients, programs, program deliv-
ery, levels of services, and the managing of staff and financial resources.
The managing-up culture is preoccupied with process, with protecting
the prime minister and ministers, and with managing the media and their
“gotcha” bias. Its emphasis is on blame avoidance. The managing-up
culture is the one that matters most, and it is expensive to operate. The
managing-down culture has little choice but to tolerate the managing-up
culture and try to work around it. To challenge the managing-up culture
by pointing to its flaws, even internally, is a sure way for public servants to
stunt their careers (Savoie, 2013).
To be sure, central agencies have delegated considerable management
authority to line departments to staff, classify or reclassify positions and
to manage financial resources. Deputy ministers now hold authority to
reclassify positions and to hire consultants to prepare the paperwork to
produce the reclassification. Until a few years ago, deputy ministers and
senior departmental officials also had the authority to move funds from
programs to operating expenses to meet funding demands for reclassifi-
cations or establishing new positions. However, delegation of authority
has been accompanied with a requirement to produce one evaluation
and performance assessment report after another. Managers have never
been able to make results-based accountability work. Year after year, the
auditor general points out that the capacity to measure performance in
government departments is inadequate and urges that more resources and
greater efforts be earmarked to that end. Year after year, the Treasury
Board Secretariat makes the case that line departments need to do better

at program evaluation. The Treasury Board now produces an annual

report on the “Health of the Evaluation Function”, and it introduced
in 2007–08 a central funding initiative worth $10.7 million per year to
increase government-wide allocation to evaluation functions. Its 2010
annual report pointed to several weaknesses, including the need to empha-
size “the use of evaluations to support a broader range of decisions”
(Government of Canada, 2010). Yet year after year, the efforts still come
up short. Other than the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Office of the
Auditor General – which have done a very poor job at assessing their own
performances or having independent, arm’s-length evaluation of their per-
formance carried out – it is not at all clear that there is a market for such
performance evaluation reports.13
Members of Parliament have shown precious little interest in the
reports. The former chair of the Public Accounts Committee explains
that they are “lacking in credibility and objectivity and are basically
self-serving and congratulatory fluff” (Murphy, 2010: 37). If there is one
parliamentary committee that should have some interest in these reports,
it is the Public Accounts Committee. The media, MPs and voters also pay
scant, if any, attention to the volumes and volumes of reports submitted
to Parliament every year.
The point is that one can fudge reports but one can hardly fudge cen-
trally prescribed policies, rules and regulations. The former behaviour is
associated with new public administration, the latter with the old public
administration. One needs to look no further than the work of public and
private sector unions to see the stark difference between the two sectors.
FABRICATING A BOTTOM LINE
For management in the public sector to emulate private sector manage-

ment, a bottom line had to be fabricated. This has been the driving force of
management reform in the Canadian government since the 1980s.
On management, senior public servants concluded that producing more
evaluation and performance reports and responding to the Office of the
Auditor General’s latest fashion would somehow be seen as making public
sector management look like that in the private sector. The result is that
government departments in Ottawa are now top heavy, with overhead
units producing all manner of reports, from risk management to evalu-
ation and performance-pay schemes. One suspects, however, that many
senior public servants would agree with the findings of Julian Le Grand
on motivation in the public sector when he concluded that it is “difficult, if
not impossible” to construct a viable measuring and monitoring system to

indicate better performance (Le Grand, 2003: 47). No matter; it is in their

interest to produce such reports if only to show politicians that manage-
ment in government can be as strong as that found in the private sector.
No one in line departments is in a position to stand up and say that these
costly initiatives are leading nowhere and that the notion that one can
transform public sector management to look like that of the private sector
is misguided.
NOT ALL IS WELL
Yet there are signs that not all is well in the Canadian public service.
Surveys reveal a stubborn morale problem that will not go away, and the
federal public service has in the past few years been plagued by “soaring
disability claims”.14 According to a report from the Public Service Alliance
of Canada (PSAC), nearly 4000 public servants – a record – filed disability
claims in 2010. Mental health disorders, led by depression and anxiety,
accounted for nearly 50 percent of the claims. In 1991, only 23.7 percent of
the claims were for mental health disorders. Bill Wilkerson, co-founder of
the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental
Health, described the government workplace as “an emotionally airless
environment” and an “almost uninhabitable workplace”.15
Statistics Canada reported in 2009 that “low morale was prevalent
among executives and knowledge workers”, and that in the federal public
service “many employees felt that workplace conditions were not condu-
cive to confidence in management, job satisfaction and career advance-
ment” (Government of Canada, 2009). A number of observers have also
written about a “serious morale challenge” in the federal public service
(see, among others, Winsor, 2010: 8).
WHAT TO DO?
Unless one is able to disconnect the work of public servants from a highly
charged political environment – which is unlikely – one should look
to the past for the way ahead. The argument here is that public sector
administration remains joined at the hip to the country’s political institu-
tions. Ambitious public service reforms are unlikely to have much success
without correspondingly ambitious reforms to the political institutions.
Waiting for such a development is like waiting for the Greek month of
calends.
If anything, our political institutions are less tolerant of administrative

miscues than they were 40 years ago. Permanent election campaigns, tied
to the rise of the new media and “gotcha” journalism, along with access
to information legislation, have had a profound impact on public sector
management at about the same time that politicians decided to look to the
private sector for inspiration on how to fix bureaucracy. Thus, precisely
at the point when politicians, the media and taxpayers sought more clarity
on how government spends, and looked for ways to ensure that public
servants could not squirm out of their Weberian apparatus, centrally pre-
scribed rules and processes were substantially reduced in a fruitless search
for a bottom line in government operations. The verdict? We have wit-
nessed in the last decade, in particular, a tremendous growth in the cost of
government operations, and, as Chris Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert argue
in their widely read Public Management Reform, we have seen, after 30
years of public sector reform efforts, “falling civil service prestige” (Pollitt
and Bouckaert, 2000: 92).
We now need to promote the idea of a public service with a distinctive
status, culture, terms and conditions (Lynn, 2006). We need to reaffirm
both the role of representative democracy and the central position of
statutes in defining the role of policy makers and decision makers. The
thinking here is that rediscovering roots will rescue the public administra-
tion from simple assumptions tied to economic self-interest and deductive
models, and release it from the mantra that reforms inspired by the private
sector can drive productive change in the public sector.
The goal should be to place renewed emphasis on procedural controls
and rules, on the distinctiveness of the public sector, and on rediscovering
the public service’s sense of frugality (Hood, 1994). This calls for an over-
haul of the work of agents of Parliament, the machinery of government,
and rebuilding the relationship between politicians and public servants. It
calls on politicians to see merit in evidence-based policy advice.
Paul Tellier, former Cabinet Secretary to the Mulroney government,
told the media that senior public servants need to rediscover the capacity
to “say no to ministers when required” (Tellier, 2006: A1). This will not
happen just because we wish it to happen or because a former Cabinet
Secretary suggests that it should. We need to give public servants a statu-
tory capacity and duty to perform in this manner. If this is not possible,
citizens will have to accept that their public service will never measure up
to expectations. It will remain riddled with inefficiencies and will be far
more costly to taxpayers than necessary. And retaining the best and the
brightest in the public service will become increasingly difficult, despite
generous salaries and highly attractive employment benefits.
How deputy ministers are appointed needs an overhaul. It is no longer
appropriate for the prime minister and the clerk of the Privy Council

to hand-pick appointees from a limited pool of candidates from central

agencies who have little experience in actually delivering programs and
services to Canadians. Other Westminster-style parliamentary systems
and some provincial governments in Canada have opened up the appoint-
ment process to competition (see, among others, Aucoin and Jarvis, 2005;
Government of Canada, 2005). It is considerably easier to speak truth
to power and to be fearless in providing advice when a public servant’s
appointment is supported by formal processes and structures, rather than
leaving such officials on their own to deal with two powerful individuals –
the prime minister and the clerk – who have all the power to decide who
makes it to the top and who stays there.
Simplicity, formal rules, formal processes, a recognition that the public
sector has its own intrinsic characteristics, along with the promotion of a
parsimonious culture in government operations, a streamlined hierarchy,
transparency and a three-way moral contract, can rebuild the federal
public service’s credibility with Canadian taxpayers and politicians. This
will assist members of Parliament and Canadians in general to gain a
better understanding of government operations and a greater ability to
determine “who gets the most of what there is to get” (Lasswell, 1990).
NOTES
1. See, for example, “The Two Tonys”, New Yorker, 6 October 1997 and the UK docu-
ment Modernising Government, presented to Parliament by the prime minister and the
minister of the Cabinet Office, 1999, p. 11.
2. Consultation with a senior Industry Canada official, Moncton, 23 December 2011.
3. See, among others, “Tony Clement clears the air on census”, www.theglobeandmail.
com, 21 July 2010.
4. Sheikh (2011), pp. 305–35.
5. Ibid., p. 329.
6. Globe and Mail (2010).
7. Sheikh (2011), p. 327.
8. “Making copyright work better online: a process report”, Google Public Policy Blog-
blogspot.com, 2 September 2011.
9. Based on information from the Treasury Board Secretariat as reported in Steve Maher,
“Harper’s PR obsession fostering paranoia and paralysis in public service”, www.
canada.com, 30 November 2011.
10. Government of Canada (2007), pp. 4 and 9.
11. Government of Canada (2011).
12. Government of Canada (2012), p. 4.
13. The office argues that it has called for an international peer review of its performance.
The most recent was conducted by a team of like-minded auditors from the Australian
National Office in 2009. See Government of Canada, External Reviews (Ottawa: Office
of the Auditor General, 2010).
14. “PS disability claims soaring”, www.ottawacitizen.com, 28 June 2011. See also
“Depression in PS a public health crisis”, www.ottawacitizen.com, 10 January 2010.
15. Quoted in “PS disability claims soaring”.

REFERENCES
Aucoin, Peter (2004) “Influencing public policy and decision-making: power shifts”, notes
for presentation to the 2004 APEX Symposium, “Parliament, the People, and Public
Service”, Ottawa, 6–7 October.
Aucoin, Peter and Jarvis, Mark D. (2005) Modernizing Government Accountability: A
Framework for Reform, Ottawa: Canada School of the Public Service.
Beck, Ulrich (2007) Power in the Global Ages: A New Global Political Economy, trans.
Kathleen Cross, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 52.
Bourgault, Jacques (1997) “De Kafka au Net: la lutte incessante du sous-ministre pour con-
trôler son agenda”, Gestion, 22(2): 21–2.
Dahlström, Carl, Peters, B. Guy and Pierre, Jon (2011) Steering from the Centre: Strengthening
Drummond, Don (2011) “Personal reflections on the state of public policy analysis in
Canada”, in Fred Gorbet and Andrew Sharpe (eds), New Directions for Intelligent
Government in Canada: Papers in Honour of Ian Stewart, Ottawa: Centre for the Study of
Living Standards, pp. 328–41.
Farrell, John A. (2001) Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, Boston, MA: Little Brown
and Company.
Fischer, Frank (1998) “Beyond empiricism: policy inquiry in postpositivist perspective”,
Policy Studies 26(1): 129–46.
Fischer, Frank (2003) Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices,
Globe and Mail (1996) “Lewis Mackenzie: on choosing a Chief of Defence Staff”, Globe and
Mail (Toronto), 27 May, A17.
Globe and Mail (2010) “The inconvenient truth in Mr. Sheikh’s resignation”, www.theglobe-
andmail.com, 22 July.
Government of Canada (2005) Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and
Advertising Activities, Toronto roundtable.
Government of Canada (2007) Fourteenth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public
Service of Canada, Ottawa: Privy Council Office.
Government of Canada (2009) Public Service Employee Survey, Ottawa: Statistics Canada.
Government of Canada (2010) Annual Report on the Health of the Evaluation Function, www.
tbs-sct.gc.ca/report.
Government of Canada (2011) Fifth Report to the Prime Minister: A Public Service for
Challenging Times, Ottawa: Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service.
Government of Canada (2012) Sixth Report of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on
the Public Service: Moving Ahead – Public Service Renewal in a Time of Change, Ottawa:
Privy Council Office.
Government of Canada Secretariat (1990) Public Service 2000, Ottawa: Privy Council Office.
Gregg, Allan (2011) “Telling the naked truth is good politics”, www.theglobeandmail.com,
19 December.
Heintzman, Ralph (1999) “The effects of globalization on management practices: should the
public sector operate on different parameters?” Paper presented to the Institute of Public
Administration of Canada (IPAC) National Conference, Fredericton, NB, 31 August,
pp. 7–9.
Heintzman, Ralph (2010) “Loyal to a fault,” Optimum Online, 40(1): 6.
Hill Times (Ottawa) “PM Harper takes communications strategy to a whole new level”, Hill
Times (Ottawa), 21 November, 33.
Hood, Christopher (1994) Explaining Economic Policy Reversals, Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Hood, Christopher (2011) “From FO1 world to WikiLeaks world: a new chapter in the trans-
parency story?”, Governance, 24(4): 635–8.
Jacobs, Jane (1992) Systems of Survival, New York: Random House.

Johnson, Al (1961) “The role of the Deputy Minister: III”, Canadian Public Administration,
4(4): 367.
Lasswell, Harold (1990) Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, Gloucester, MA: New
Edition.
LeGrand, Julian (2003) Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves,
Pawns and Queens, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lynn, Lawrence E. (2006) Public Management: Old and New, London: Routledge.
Martin, Paul (2011) Hell or High Water: My Life in and out of Politics. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart.
Mintzberg, Henry (1996) “Managing government, governing management”, Harvard
Business Review, May–June, 75.
Murphy, Shawn (2010) Quoted in “Annual departmental performance reports lack credibil-
ity, objectivity”, Hill Times, 18 October, p. 37.
Pollitt, Christopher and Bouckaert, Geert (2000) Public Management Reform: A Comparative
Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savoie, Donald J. (1994) Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy,
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, ch. 4.
Savoie, Donald J. (2008) Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and
the United Kingdom, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Savoie, Donald J. (2013) Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher: How Government Decides
and Why, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Scholte, Jan Aart (1997) “Global capitalism and the states”, International Affairs, 73(3),
427–39.
Sheikh, Munir (2011) “Good data and intelligent government”, in Fred Gorbet and Andrew
Sharpe (eds), New Directions for Intelligent Government in Canada: Papers in Honour of Ian
Stewart, Ottawa: Centre for the Study of Living Standards, pp. 305–35.
Tellier, Paul (1990) “Public Service 2000: the renewal of the public service”, Canadian Public
Administration, 33(2): 123–32.
Tellier, P. (2006) “Stop talking about fixing government, just do it, public says”, Citizen
(Ottawa), 14 August.
Weiss, Carol (1990) “Policy research data, ideas or arguments?”, in Peter Wagner, Carol
H. Weiss, Björn Wittrock and Hellmut Wollmann (eds), Social Sciences and Modern
States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, James Q. (1989) Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It,
New York: Basic Books, chs 7 and 11.
Winsor, Hugh (2010) “A new style for the public service”, Kingston: Queen’s University
News Centre.

9. Public administration and governance in
the USA
Greg Andranovich and J. Theodore Anagnoson
INTRODUCTION
The relationship between public administration and governance in the

USA has shifted dramatically in the period since the 1960s. On the surface,
the 1960s represented a decade of growth of government, expanding the
reach of the administrative state beyond the nation’s economy and into
areas of social regulation. Beneath the surface, however, questions about
power in America, and the relationship between the American people
and their government, were being revisited as authority was shifted from
governmental organizations to the people through, for example, the early
community action programs in the War on Poverty. A number of new pro-
grams were developed to lift the American people out of poverty and to
provide more access to a better life, and many of these programs required
the people directly, or community organizations as a proxy, to be involved
in their design and implementation. The idea that government was a neces-
sary, but not sufficient, instrument to authoritatively allocate values (that
is, to make and implement public policy) ultimately led to an exploratory
journey back into the nature of American public administration and gov-
ernance. In 1972, two of our colleagues taking that journey wrote a short
book, From Amoral to Humane Bureaucracy, critically analyzing execu-
tive power and bureaucratic institutions (Dvorin and Simmons, 1972).
Rereading that book today is a reminder that the struggles to achieve
better governance cannot be found in the routine application of our exist-
ing ‘models of administration’. Dvorin and Simmons were concerned with
the effects of efficiency and triangular hierarchy in the exercise of anony-
mous bureaucratic power as it ground down concerns for human dignity,
and how this affected public policy making and its implementation. They
wrote,
Contemporary studies abound that document the plain fact the few Americans
can ever realize what they have been indoctrinated to believe it is their right to
expect. The gap between anticipation and realization is no longer a characteris-
tic uniquely attributable to the less developed Third World. (Ibid., p. 67)
199

Events and activities regarding public administration and the search

for better governance in the summer and autumn of 2013 illustrated how
many of the concerns noted by Dvorin and Simmons 40 or more years
ago remain the challenges facing us today and tomorrow. Three episodes
in particular showed the face of public administration and the challenges
of governance in the USA. The first was the Bradley Manning espio-
nage trial, in which military intelligence analyst Manning, who in 2010
leaked classified Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, video logs, US State
Department cables and other documents before being arrested and inter-
rogated in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, USA, was given a
35-year sentence for sharing classified material with the press. The second
event involved the most secret of the intelligence agencies in the USA – the
National Security Agency (NSA) – becoming an almost daily news story
around the world following the revelations of a massive domestic and
international spying operation, leaked by a defense contractor who fled
Hawaii to Hong Kong before divulging the details of NSA programs to a
British journalist living in Brazil. In addition to the general architecture of
the telecommunications spying were the revelations that the US Congress
was sloppy in its oversight of this spying operation in the post-9/11 world.
The clumsy posturing regarding ‘who knew what when’ in the American
government, and then in several European governments, followed by the
‘grounding’ of the Bolivian president’s airplane in Spain and the deten-
tion of a Brazilian journalist (partner of the journalist who reported the
NSA leaks) in London’s Heathrow Airport for eight hours could only be
topped by this: the American defense contractor Edward Snowden, whose
requests for political asylum were turned down while he was stranded in
the transit zone of Moscow Airport after the US government cancelled
his passport, was finally given political asylum in . . . Russia! The third
event was the shutdown of the American government by the US House of
Representatives, where the Republican majority fractured over demands
to not fund access to healthcare (Obamacare) through a tax on medical
devices (among other things), and the American government shut down
its operations for 16 days, initially furloughing 800 000 federal workers
on 1 October 2013, the start of the new federal fiscal year. That the US
government does not have a fallback position to counter the effects of
partisan political bickering led the Chinese government news agency to
speculate that perhaps it was time to look for a de-Americanized global
economy.
These three episodes, and many others, demonstrate the changed
nature of governance today and how the role of public administration
in governance has become far more complex in the USA of the early
twenty-first century. Upon his exit from the presidency, D. Eisenhower

Public administration and governance in the USA 201
warned America to beware the military–industrial complex, and his words

were prescient. The rise of the military–industrial complex signaled both
a major shift in our understanding of how public policy decisions were
made and that the gaze of American government extended toward broader
horizons. In short order, the level of administrative complexity increased
as the scope of decisions expected of government agencies expanded
beyond national defense and the American economy into regulatory
arenas involving the environment, the workplace and the home. In these
new functional arenas, the intersections of policy substance and political
process led to tension, conflict and opportunity: which knowledge was
relevant, how certain were we, what level of risk was acceptable, which
organization or organizations were involved in implementation, and how
advances in technology affected governance illustrated the administra-
tive management challenges facing decision makers in the agencies of the
administrative state. These tensions certainly are reflective of value differ-
ences, but also how these values (and their differences) are contextualized
in decision making.
Our examination of American public administration and governance
addresses the public administration challenges in a changed decision-
making environment. We begin with a discussion of the unique context
of public administration in the USA, continue with an examination of
governance issues today before examining different reform ideas, and
then we conclude with the challenges of managing in a more complex
world. Although we are using the term ‘governance’ confidently, we note
that the conditions surrounding it – ranging from its full description,
to its operation, to its consequences – are not yet fully established in
public administration theory. What we can say about governance is that
a number of trends have evolved that depict the shift from the state, as
the primary actor in making and implementing public policy, to a more
complex institutional environment that incorporates multiple scales (from
the supranational to the local) and involves not only the public sector
but also contractors, private and nongovernmental institutions whose
involvement includes limited oversight and monitoring while working
through markets and networks in the search for solutions to a number of
interrelated problems and challenges. As was the case in the 1960s (and
earlier, we should add), there are both surface-level explanations and
deeper questions about the balance of power in America, and the role
of government in supporting, mediating or breaking down entrenched
private interests.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AMERICAN STYLE
In the beginning (1789), the issues of greatest importance in American

government were representation of citizens and the separation of powers
to prevent tyranny, and these twin forces, preserving liberty and limiting
government, have informed most discussions of American government
organization and governing ever since that time. The focus on represen-
tation and the separation of powers led to a government that represents
Americans based on geography and provides for several competing
branches and levels of government. This combination of geographic rep-
resentation and competing power centers ensures that a certain level of
conflict and competition will always be present in American government,
and that power will always be ‘moving’ in our governing system. The
federal structure of our political system ensures that both the national
and state governments have constitutional powers; some powers are
national, some are state and some are shared powers. Local governments
are not mentioned in the US Constitution, but local government became
an increasingly important player in national and state politics as the
national government implemented programs focused on the local level,
particularly since the 1960s. And for American public administration,
this captures the essence of the dilemma: developing a theory or theories
that guide the actions of the administrative state in a context in which the
functional actions of the administrative state are not deemed as important
as the issues of representation, and the administrative state has evolved
in response to political changes. So, to begin to understand the role of
government is to look at what government ‘is’. Table 9.1 shows changes in
units of American government over the past 60 years.
Table 9.1 shows that the policy-making context in the USA is extremely
fragmented, with overlapping geographies of jurisdiction that have been
structurally fluid through history. While the federal government and state
governments have remained consistent in number, at the substate level
changes are constant, with nearly 2500 units of government added in the
decade 2002–12. The sheer number of these governments can be seen as
either an impediment to action, or providing multiple avenues for par-
ticipation. What Table 9.1 does not show is where power is located in the
federal system. Until the economic recession of the 1930s most functions
of government were carried out at the state and local levels, and the federal
government exercised limited domestic powers. In fact, in the early periods
of American history a doctrine of ‘dual federalism’ was practiced, and the
powers of the federal government and the states were seen as distinct and
almost mutually exclusive (Rivlin, 1992). After the Great Depression of
the 1930s spread throughout the economy, when it became evident that the

Table 9.1 Number of governmental units by type, 1952–2012
Type 1952 1962 1972 1982 1992 2002 2012

US government 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
State 48 50 50 50 50 50 50
government
Local 116 756 91 186 78 218 81 780 84 955 87 525 90 056
governments
Counties 3052 3043 3044 3041 3043 3034 3031
Municipal 16 807 18 000 18 517 19 076 19 279 19 429 19 519
Township/town 17 202 17 142 16 991 16 734 16 656 16 504 16 360
School district 67 355 34 678 15 781 14 851 14 422 13 506 12 880
Special district 12 340 18 323 23 885 28 078 31 555 35 052 38 266
Sources: US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2008, Table 414; US
Census Bureau, Census of Governments, Volume Vol. 1, No. 1, Government; Organization
Series GC02(1)-1; US Census Bureau, Census of Governments: Organization Component
Preliminary Estimates, 2012; data are not subject to sampling error, but for information on
nonsampling error and definitions, see http://www.census.gov/govs/cog2012.
states and local governments could not adequately respond to the effects
of economic devastation, the people elected a president who promised
that the national government would take action to resolve the economic
crisis. It was evident that, if the economy had become a national economy,
America’s federal government needed to be able to act nationally since
the states could not act beyond their borders. In this new environment,
the USA created social security, unemployment insurance, strengthened
banking and credit institutions and practices, and began more extensive
economic regulation, including putting in place the infrastructure for
future economic development; all of this required specialized government
agencies for implementation. In these early days of federal government
expansion, the perceived role of public administration in governance was
simply to implement policies made in the elected branches of g overnment –
the Congress or through presidential actions. Implementation focused on
administrative techniques grounded in scientific rationality in search of
efficiency, and displayed through the narrow span of control in hierarchi-
cal organizations to ensure accountability (Wilson, 1887).
The American states continued to play an important part in the
expansion of the federal government in the aftermath of World War II.
However, in large part the role played by the states was a negative one:
they were limited in resources, and state politics reflected America’s pre-
recession past in legislatures dominated by rural interests and without pro-
fessional staff. This combination often led to outcomes that today we call

‘bad governance’: entrenched interests directing public policy that was not
responsive to the increasing urban populations that included racial and
ethnic minorities who, in many cases, were prohibited (either legally or by
cultural practice) from participating in politics. By the 1960s there was a
new call for the federal government to increase its spending in functions
that were previously the domain of the states: housing, education, job
training and health services. With this came an interest in incorporating
new groups – racial and ethnic minorities, women and young people – into
the political process, broadening the empirical boundaries of the public
interest. In this environment, expansionary federal programs became
the jurisdiction of a renewed public administration where the role of the
administrative state was not simply to manage implementation efficiently,
but instead became enmeshed in the politics of expansion and political
incorporation. In what Patterson (2012) describes as the pivotal year for
change, 1965, all of these challenges came together in the transformation
of American society and culture. From civil rights violence perpetrated
by local police in the American South to the expansion of the Vietnam
War, the political and administrative repercussions resulted in a more
measured, emergent conservative politics.
Table 9.2 shows the size of the American government in terms of the
personnel employed. What is clear is that the size of federal government
exploded during the years of World War II, and then again in the 1960s; it
peaked in 1990, which led President Clinton to proclaim in his 1996 state
of the union address, ‘the days of big government are over’. In terms of
personnel employed by the federal government, this seems to be the case as
public sector employment has declined since 1990. Table 9.2 does not show
the increased responsibilities of ‘big’ government, or that these responsi-
bilities are increasingly met by a large contingent of contractors who are
not government employees, or the fact that American government is not
that big (as a percentage of the American economy, compared to govern-
ments in other developed nations), or that ‘big’ American government
has not abridged the civil liberties or civil rights of the American people
by abusing and usurping the people’s rights to voice opinions or partici-
pate in democracy. The challenge today is fitting the government, and the
administrative state in particular, to the requisites of governing. This is no
easy task in the American political environment, which is notoriously anti-
government in its rhetoric, and often anti-democratic in its public policy.
As Neiman (2000, pp. 3–4) points out, a significant c hallenge lies in the
way in which rhetoric shapes governance:
the language of antigovernment sentiment and the accompanying political

success of antigovernment politicians have produced an interpretation of

Table 9.2 Number of federal, state and local civil servants, per 100 000 population (numbers in thousands)
Year All levels of government Federal government State governments Local governments Resident
pop. of
Number Per % Number Per % Number Per % Number Per %
the US
1000 change 1000 change 1000 change 1000 change
pop. pop. pop. pop.
1901 231 3.0 77 584
1910 380 4.1 38.1 92 407
1920 645 6.1 47.3 106 461
1930 589 4.8 −21.0 123 077
1940 699 5.3 10.7 131 954
205
1946 6001 42.8 2434 17.4 228.1 804 5.7 2762 19.7 140 054
1950 6402 42.2 −1.6 2117 13.9 −19.8 1057 7.0 21.2 3228 21.3 7.8 151 868
1960 8808 48.9 16.1 2421 13.5 −3.5 1527 8.5 21.9 4860 27.0 27.0 179 979
1970 13 028 63.9 30.5 2881 14.1 5.0 2755 13.5 59.2 7392 36.2 34.2 203 984
1980 16 213 71.4 11.7 2898 12.8 −9.7 3753 16.5 22.3 9562 42.1 16.1 227 225
1990 18 369 73.6 3.1 3105 12.4 −2.5 4503 18.0 9.2 10 760 43.1 2.4 249 623
2000 20 876 74.0 0.5 2899 10.3 −17.4 4877 17.3 −4.2 13 099 46.4 7.7 282 224
2005 21 725 72.7 −1.8 2720 9.1 −11.4 5078 17.0 −1.7 13 926 46.6 0.3 299 000
2011 22 156 71.1 −2.1 2854 9.2 0.7 5314 17.1 0.4 13 988 44.9 −3.6 311 587
Source: Original data from the US Census Bureau, Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll, 2011.

g overnment growth and a view of government size that serves the political ends
of the prosperous and the powerful, at the expense of those who are not [and]
important changes in the world economy and issues at home . . . will be shaped
by the rhetorical and political constraints posed by antigovernment sentiment.
It is in this context that American public administration is organized.

Stillman’s (1991) discussion of the four different ‘contemporary visions’
of the American state captures the general tenor of the analysis of
American public administration. The underlying question is: how much
power can we give to government while preserving individual liberty? One
vision is for ‘no state’, the minimalist vision of a very limited government
that is decentralized, its key staff political appointees, with a strong pref-
erence for top–down direction. There is a definite split between politics
(at the top) and administration. The most important criteria informing
administrative actions are economy and efficiency, and there is a strong
reliance on the free market as a guidepost for public decision making.
In sharp contrast to this is the ‘bold-state’ vision, where the role of the
state in society is broadly expanded. The key staff are career bureaucrats,
and governance is bottom–up, with citizens, various interests and public
officials all involved in the public decision-making process. Indeed, in this
vision there are cooperative relations between politics and administra-
tion, and the strongest criteria for action are those favoring managerial
effectiveness.
The other two visions fall in between. A ‘pre-state’ envisions govern-
ment serving as a balance wheel, with the different levels of government
doing what is necessary to meet society’s needs. The key staff in this vision
are from the three branches of government and administrators, who
bargain, negotiate and fix their way through problems, actions and influ-
ences that arise from all sides. Relations between politics and administra-
tion are complex and indefinable. Governance is guided by pragmatism,
and muddling through is the best way to describe the criterion for action.
The fourth vision is a ‘pro-state’. Here the role of government is global and
all-encompassing. The key staff are specialized experts whose professional
expertise guides policy at all levels of government. There is no relationship
with politics, as technocracy rules and technical rationality and expertise
determine the criteria for action. While these four visions might seem to be
mutually exclusive, we can argue that they always are present, in varying
degrees and at different times, in American public administration and
governance. Indeed, these four visions get to the root of the administration
challenge: how should the administrative state be organized?
In sum, the earliest notions of public administration drew on the sepa-
ration of politics and administration, and a concentration on organizing

implementation to meet externally established political and policy goals.

The visions of the organization of the American administrative state
tend to follow this line of thinking. The conceptual separation of politics
and administration collapsed after World War II, particularly under the
critique of administration leveled by Herbert Simon (1946). In its place,
the central role of decision making refocused attention on public admin-
istration’s organization, and it renewed the concern over the relationship
between the people and the government, but this shift toward governance
raised the stakes for public administration as traditional hierarchical
forms of organizing policy implementation gave way to the changing
landscape of challenges facing government decision makers.
FROM GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNANCE
A number of structural and contextual elements make it difficult to even

think about a centralized administrative state in the USA. The American
federal system evolved as a multilevel governance system, where the scope
of conflict over specific policy issues can be shifted nationally to the federal
level, regionally to the state level, or locally to the city, county or special
districts that overlay American communities (Schattschneider, 1960). In
large part, this is in response to the type of government that Americans
favor: a limited government, with consent of the governed, a consistent
rule of law, and where change is possible but should be difficult to achieve.
Governance responsibility is shared between the national and subnational
levels, but there is an uneasy ‘national supremacy’ that is often tied to
expenditures of funds for public purposes (and court decisions on the
limits of power), and an equally uneasy ‘maximum of local self-control’
that is tied to each of the political traditions in each of the 50 states. At
the national level, there has evolved since the 1960s an extensive grants-
in-aid program that leans heavily toward categorical grants (giving the
grantor maximum authority over the grantee, and sometimes even over
the Congress; see Anagnoson, 1982) over block grants in most functional
areas of assistance. Many of these grants require matching funds or other
resources from recipient governments or agencies, and there are often
other conditions attached to the funding. In addition to funding, there
is technical assistance that can be provided to support implementation.
However, there is often bargaining and negotiation that occurs in rela-
tion to how the funding level can achieve policy and program priorities,
effectively shifting power to subnational levels. At the subnational level
there is a tension between state control and local ‘home rule’ that provides
local jurisdictions more authority in the states that have a more permissive

stance toward local governance authority. In either case, it is at the local

level that the effects of service delivery are experienced most acutely.
In this dynamic environment of widely distributed power and coopera-
tive and competitive relations that rely on bargaining to achieve results,
there are a number of benefits and dysfunctions that characterize the
governance process (Wright, 1988). These are expected when process and
human relationships are emphasized in governance, and both govern-
mental and nongovernmental agencies are involved, and the results of
decision making often are not ‘zero sum’ (Agranoff, 2007). Chief among
the benefits are flexibility in decision making, encouraging innovation
and fostering competition, which leads to responsiveness and efficiency,
preventing management overload, coping with conflict and fostering
participation (Nice and Frederickson, 1995). There are also several chal-
lenges, or dysfunctions, in governance, including the neglect of exter-
nalities, coordination problems, unresponsiveness, inequalities, various
localistic and professional biases, the loss of accountability, and even the
evasion of responsibility. Multilevel governance in the USA (often called
‘intergovernmental relations’) increasingly requires the management of
these horizontal intersectoral approaches, including public–private part-
nerships, as well as the more traditional vertical relations. This is due in
part to the influence of the reinventing government phenomenon in the
USA (described in the next section), which propelled interest in devolv-
ing governmental authority and responsibility from the national level to
levels of government that were closer to the issue, and possibly privatizing
the production of services, or perhaps contracting them out for more
efficient results. Although the growth of intergovernmental networks was
clear in the expansion of federal grants in aid during the 1960s, network
management became an issue as a result of the popularity of reinventing
government. The boundary- spanning behavior central to the efficacy
of intergovernmental and intersectoral approaches is captured by the
‘network’ metaphor. Here we find a nonhierarchical decision- making
environment where uncertainty is a commonly found characteristic, and
control issues are confounded by jurisdictional, legal, political, and even
professional claims and counterclaims of authority. In this environment,
a collaborative strategy for engaging all stakeholders becomes an impor-
tant requisite to limit the dysfunction (Andranovich, 1995; Vandeventer
and Mandell, 2011). Even public–private partnerships are nothing new
in the American administrative management landscape (large-scale infra-
structure projects have been managed this way), but became more
widespread in the administration of national domestic policy objectives
after the National Performance Review reinvention initiative launched
during the Clinton presidency, and were seen in new arenas since 2001,

such as the number of private military contractors in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Another major change in governance has been in response to globaliza-
tion. Globalization’s effects were widely experienced in the US economy
in the 1970s, starting with the OPEC oil embargo in 1973. Although we
did not recognize it at the time, and perhaps because of the Cold War’s
effect on American policy making, the American view of the world was
structured around our antagonistic relationship with the Soviet Union
instead of growing economic interdependence. The OPEC embargo pro-
vided a wakeup call, but one that was not heeded. When the Berlin Wall
fell in 1989, the existing ‘threat–response mindset’ for dealing with inter-
national affairs was questioned (Rivlin, 1992, p. 27), as was the deploy-
ment of US forces and other resources to contain the Soviet Union. In
the then-emergent post-Cold War world, power was no longer usefully
defined in economic or military terms because the nature of the policy and
political challenges changed, almost overnight. Rivlin (ibid., p. 29) put it
this way: ‘In an era when the [USA] can no longer dominate economi-
cally, leading by persuasion, example, and coalition building becomes
increasingly important’. What this meant, and whether it was a positive
or negative outcome, was and remains contested (cf. Wallerstein, 2003;
Fukuyama, 1992). Underlying these events, however, are the much more
subtle effects of technological advances. In 1990 the USA was struggling
to separate domestic and foreign affairs, and manage them differently;
in 2013 the arenas are clearly interdependent and the USA is struggling
to provide a rationale for managing them differently and finding limited
success. From commerce to finance, technology has led to increased global
interdependence. Interdependence has introduced, or perhaps ‘imposed’
is more accurate, new performance standards in the economy and for
politics and administration. Interdependence also has introduced new
social and cultural influences into the mix, and these have had their own
effects – sometimes unclear or misunderstood, but rarely easily resolved –
on governance. It seems evident that these impacts are still being sorted
out, as the continuing fallout from the Snowden revelations about NSA
metadata collection efforts will show.
The task of governance and public administration’s role in it in the USA
begins with the issue of the relationship between government and society,
and with the people’s expectations of their government. As the size of the
national government has shrunk, expectations for public action have not.
One result has been the rise of indirect support for a variety of programs,
or what Mettler (2011) has called the ‘submerged state’. Her analysis of
student aid, tax relief and health care in the USA demonstrates how the
changed politics has led to a shift in program benefits (from direct benefits

to various types of indirect subsidies). During the several decades of more

conservative and polarized politics since 1980, a trend that saw its origins
in earlier times flourished: using administrative simplicity as a rationale,
public benefits were shifted into indirect categories (e.g. tax breaks).
After all, it is easier to rationalize a tax break than to initiate a spending
program with direct benefits in the current political environment. The new
indirect subsidies benefit the more well-to-do in the economy, particu-
larly those in fast-growth sectors – finance, insurance and real estate, for
example – that performed much better than the economy as a whole over
the past decades, and certainly better than average workers in the USA.
The political power of the actors representing the interests of these sectors
is daunting, and it is unchecked in the policy-making process. Rather than
shrinking the size of government (size defined in budgetary terms rather
than the number of federal workers), governance is complicated by the
large expenditures invisibly subsidizing wealthy corporate interests while
redistributive programs for the people are on the cutting board. These
sorts of cynical political moves have continued the trend of Americans
distrusting their government, and the last few US Congresses (111th,
112th and 113th sessions) have seen the trust deficit rise in terms of how
the American people perceive the national government (Pew Research
Center, 2013). However, federal agencies are viewed favorably compared
to the US Congress.
REFORM IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
The issue of trust in government provides a sense of the challenges in

discussing reform in public administration and governance. As political
science research has shown, the issue of trust is complex. For our pur-
poses, the argument put forth by Stillman (1991) on the stateless origins
of American public administration theory – that the debate on the found-
ing principles for our government sought to limit government power to
prevent abuses and tyranny, and focused on issues of representation and
the separation of powers, not administration – serves to orient our discus-
sion of reform, and to locate it in this broader, American cultural current
of limited government, based in notions of natural law and individual lib-
erties, republicanism, popular sovereignty, majority rule and slow, delib-
erate change. Stillman (1991, p. 32) summed it up best: ‘Taken together,
these elements serve to continuously pulverize administrative effectiveness
and to negate possibilities for any consistent administrative design. State
building would prove always to be a tricky business in America because
of these foundations of quicksand’. As if to verify this, Light (2006) found

177 different laws containing administrative reform measures enacted in

the period 1945–2002.
The history of reform in public administration, then, is best understood
in the broader context of two challenges for government in American
politics: how much power should be centralized, and are ‘they’ to be
trusted with this power? Light’s outstanding overview (1999, 2006) of
the ‘tides’ of reform illustrates the challenges for reformers. For Light
(1999), there are four general approaches to administrative reform, each
stemming in part from the political times and cultural values ascend-
ant in those times. One is a structural reform approach; the others are
process reforms. These approaches are scientific management (structural
reform), the war on waste, the watchful eye and liberation management.
Unlike in European nations, the history of a formal administrative state
begins almost 100 years after the founding of the USA, with the passage
of the Pendleton Act in 1883, and in Wilson’s (1887) essay, ‘The study of
administration’. Following the assassination of President Garfield by a
disgruntled patronage job seeker, Congress acted to establish a formal
merit-based civil service to replace the patronage- based government
service that existed since the Jackson presidency in the 1820s. The shift
toward a professional public service was a major tenet of the Progressive
Reform movement in the USA; this movement saw politics as corrupt
and inefficient, and took the values of administrative efficiency and
political accountability as its guideposts. Scientific management (fol-
lowing Frederick Taylor’s ‘one best way’) became the mechanism for
fighting corruption and inefficiency because it provided a rationale for
establishing certain rules and procedures that would permit power to
be centralized, but limited through formal rules. Scientific management
is well known to students of public administration in the USA through
the application of the administrative management principles known as
POSDCORB (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating,
reporting and budgeting), which also fed into the Brownlow Commission
Report in 1937 calling for new administrative capacity in the president’s
office (Gulick, 1937). Stillman (1991, p. 117) points out that these recom-
mendations to strengthen the presidency, despite F.D. Roosevelt winning
an unprecedented landslide reelection at the height of public popularity
for his New Deal programs, were called ‘the dictator bill’ and became part
of the controversy and conflict over the ‘court packing scheme’ before
eventually being partially implemented in the 1939 Reorganization Act.
Scientific management reforms characterized the period from the 1930s
to the 1960s, when the USA developed a more centralized administrative
state apparatus to implement the policies and programs of the New Deal
and the Great Society. Today, the Office of Management and Budget

reflects the reform approach where there is trust in centralized power,

as does the recent restructuring of the federal government to meet the
Homeland Security function.
The war on waste and the watchful eye provide two more views of
reform. Light points out that these reforms are often coupled with other
reforms and are brought about to fix perceived problems, and both
became more prevalent after the Watergate break-in during the 1972
presidential election campaign, when the public’s trust in government
fell. The war on waste became significant during the Reagan administra-
tion’s years in office in large part because of the rhetoric of candidate
and then President Reagan. By 1980, and the election of Reagan to the
American presidency, the conservative rhetoric that emerged in reaction
to the politics of inclusion of the Great Society years, and the feelings of
being let down by Watergate, led to a major shift in governance: the role
of the administrative state went from being problem solver to becoming
the problem itself. For those who sought a more decentralized solution
to the problem, the watchful eye became the reform approach of choice.
Both of these approaches gained traction as the USA moved to the right
in terms of public opinion, and retrenchment and anti-government rheto-
ric became the norms in political conversations. In terms of governance,
this shift toward neoliberal values privileging market principles in all
aspects of people’s lives meant that, practically speaking, government
agencies no longer were seen as a force of social progress directly deliv-
ering public services through agencies that were accountable to elected
officials; instead, government agencies would better serve the public by
following the market principles and seek nongovernmental partners to do
the work of providing services – to steer and not to row, as Osborne and
Gaebler (1992) famously put it. By the early 1990s this neoliberal turn
was cemented when Democrat Bill Clinton, then a candidate for the presi-
dency, adopted this market-based perspective as well and, after he won
office, ‘restructuring public bureaucracies into high performance organi-
zations’ became a governmental objective, while governance focused on
setting organizational missions and streamlining decision processes so that
‘customer accountability’ and ‘decentralized decision making’ marked the
shift in values and the uncoupling of public administration from its politi-
cal underpinning. This is what Light terms liberation management, his
third process approach.
In the USA, this new public management agenda was more politicized
than elsewhere, and some have argued that its consequences were felt more
in managing public services than seen in a sharp change in the structure of
governance (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2011, p. 19). As Kettl (2002, p. 93)
notes,

it focused on management rather than social values; on efficiency rather than

equity; on mid-level managers instead of elites; on generic approaches rather
than tactics tailored to specifically public issues; on organizations rather than
processes and institutions; and on management rather than political science or
sociology.
In her testimony before the US Congress on 18 June 2013, Elaine Kamarck,

the Clinton administration’s point person implementing the National
Performance Review’s (NPR’s) 1993 recommendations under the direc-
tion of Vice President Gore, made the following points that illustrate how
the different reforms come together. During the two terms of the Clinton
presidency, the size of government decreased by 426 600 persons, including
78 000 managers, making the federal government smaller than at any time
since the 1950s. In addition, some 2000 field offices were closed and some
250 programs were eliminated. $136 billion was saved by following up on
the NPR’s recommendations. Among the most important contributions
to these savings were cutting some 640 000 pages of internal agency rules
and changing procurement policy government-wide for small purchases.
Kamarck (2013) noted that the ‘reinventing government movement’ in the
federal government was premised on three ‘revolutions’: the performance
revolution; the customer revolution; and the innovation revolution. She
directed a staff whose job was to reinvent the federal government, and who
were not part of any existing agency.
The ‘performance revolution’ started with the Government Performance
and Results Act of 1993, which required each federal agency to set a
mission and develop a strategic plan to achieve it, including annual
performance targets and annual reports on performance. The process
was pilot-tested in 28 agencies beginning in 1994, and then rolled out
across the federal government in 1999. The program was changed by the
Bush administration, which adopted program-level assessment (Program
Assessment Rating Tool; for more details, see Breul and Kamensky, 2008;
Moynihan and Lavertu, 2012). In addition, the performance revolution
included a focus on the 1.1 million civil servants who were in front-line
positions, interacting with the public (this was Vice President Gore’s
definition of ‘high impact’ in the NPR), and included agencies such as the
Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and the
Social Security Administration, to find out what was working, and what
was not (Kamarck, 2013, pp. 2–5).
The ‘customer revolution’ started in three agencies – the Internal
Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Postal
Service. The idea was to determine what services customers needed by
asking them (via surveys), and then to develop service plans and standards

to meet those needs. Other rules (‘red tape’) were not justified and could
be cut. This initiative was set up to increase trust in government, then at
an all-time low of 21 percent (Kamarck, 2013, p. 5). The focus on custom-
ers ultimately led to the development of 4000 standards across 570 differ-
ent federal organizations by 1998. A ‘hammer’ award was also created to
recognize federal workers who reinvented their operations (named after
the $700 hammer purchased through fixed-cost defense contracts, and a
symbol of what was wrong with government). One of the most signifi-
cant changes in agency practice as a result of using this approach was the
electronic filing of tax returns, implemented by the IRS in 1998 and now
a common practice, after surveys showed that electronic filers were more
satisfied with the process (Kamarck, 2013, p. 6).
The ‘innovation revolution’ had two premises: front- line workers
knew what worked, and it was critical to bring information technol-
ogy into government operations. NPR staff developed ‘reinvention
labs’ to encourage federal workers to think more broadly about their
work, and to experiment with different approaches (for more on this,
see Thompson, 1999). The NPR staff also worked cooperatively with
the various employee unions through a National Partnership Council to
ensure that all employees were given a stakeholder position in reinvent-
ing government. Finally, in terms of integrating information technology
in government operations, in 1997, when only 25 percent of Americans
were on the Internet, the NPR staff issued a report of how information
technology would change the relationship of people with their govern-
ment (‘the internet would be used to bring information to the public on
its terms’; Kamarck, 2013, p. 8).
In sum, Kamarck (2013, pp. 9–10) pointed to five lessons from the
NPR that ought to be considered in any administrative reform effort:
(i) there are two ways to cut government spending – across the board,
or selectively differentiating what is efficient from what is wasteful; (ii)
it is not always easy to differentiate programs without looking at their
authorizing legislation; (iii) ‘show me an inefficient, obsolete, or waste-
ful practice or program and I can promise you that someone in the
private sector is making money off of it’; (iv) calculating efficiency means
finding benchmarks, which means providing context (e.g. when calculat-
ing waste, fraud and abuse); and (v) career bureaucrats know best what
works and what does not, and they need to be part of any administrative
reform efforts.

CHALLENGES TO MANAGING IN THE TWENTY-

FIRST CENTURY
The twenty-first century has clarified that many fundamental problems of

administration in the USA remain unresolved. For the public service, the
result of the 9/11 attacks – where deficiencies across a number of responder
agencies that were not capable of acting as a network compounded initial
security lapses and intelligence failures – was a growth in American bureau-
cracy unmatched historically except for the period just before and during
World War II, only this time much of the activity was outsourced to the
private sector (Priest and Arkin, 2010). The federal government’s response
to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 again raised questions about the ability of
government to function as an ‘emergency manager’ in the face of a large-
scale natural disaster, as did the governmental response to Hurricane Sandy
in 2012. And a series of high-profile large projects – so-called ‘megaprojects’
– often accomplished and implemented only after initial failure and the
expenditure of a great deal of resources under emergency conditions, raised
questions about the government’s ability to accomplish its goals, manage
under outsourced conditions and raise sufficient resources. Each of these
has both a political and an administrative dimension.
Governments have always had some outsourced activities. Even in
ancient times, they did not perform even the most basic functions them-
selves or make all of their own weapons and supplies; nor did they fight
all of their own wars. Today, however, the question of outsourcing, which
means the provision of what might otherwise be a government program
by an outside private or nonprofit sector organization, has become more
important because the distinction between what we often think of as
‘public’ and ‘private’ has become blurred under the influence of neoliber-
alism. Many outsourcing decisions look questionable in retrospect, and
the justification for outsourcing has changed significantly over time.
In the USA, the original colonial charters mixed public and private
functions (Novak, 2009, p. 28). During the nineteenth century, most new
American infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, canals and railroads,
was constructed with partnerships that enabled state governments, which
had few resources, to promote needed development. In the late twentieth
century, the attitude toward the public and private sectors reversed, with
the private sector looked on by many, in particular political conserva-
tives, as the superior way to provide services. Connected with this is the
predominant ideology of the late twentieth century concerning adminis-
tration, ‘New Public Management’ (NPM), in which contracting out, the
separation of service provision from service production, and privatization
are central aspects.

The Reagan administration was the first in the USA to embody this new
philosophy, in which the public sector and public provision of services are
deemed inherently inferior to private sector provision, almost no matter
what the private sector costs, and President Reagan ordered agencies
to contract out a certain portion of their activities. During the Clinton
administration, the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act of
1998 required that agencies produce lists of commercial activities that
could be contracted out. These were not to be ‘inherently governmental’
activities. Defining ‘inherently governmental’ activities is still an issue in
the Obama administration, which began with regulations issued on ‘inher-
ently governmental’ and an effort to ‘insource’ some activities, but quickly
ran into complications in 2011, and the effort appears to have become
bogged down (Clark, 2011; Federal News Radio, 2012). Since the 1990s,
the federal government has relied on ‘large-scale integrators’ to bring
together the talent needed for large-scale, often computer-related, pro-
jects, according to Kettl (2009). This approach has major disadvantages
from the standpoint of accountability.
The Obama administration reduced the amount of contracting, accord-
ing to its administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, who
left office in January 2013 noting, according to the Washington Post, that
federal contract spending had fallen from $539 billion in 2011 to $460
billion in 2013 (Davidson, 2013). Still, Bump (2013) noted that, in October
2012, the number of people with security clearances – then over 5 million –
was substantially more than the number of federal civil servants.
The major study of the extent of outsourcing is Paul Light’s several
studies of ‘The true size of government’ (Light, 1999, 2000, 2003). Light
makes the case that the true size of government is not the approximately
2 million civil servants who work for the federal government, but an addi-
tional 900 000 postal workers, 1.4 million military personnel, 2.5 million
grantee workers, and 5.6 million contractor employees. When he adds
employees at the state and local levels of government who work under
federal mandates, he arrives at approximately 16 to 17 million people, a
far cry from the 1.8 million civil servants often discussed.
Although the number of federal civil servants has fallen over time, Light
makes the case that the total numbers working directly or indirectly for the
federal government have risen. Light calculates some 8 million contractor
employees are working for the federal government, supervised by some
portion of the 1.8 million federal civil servants. Light’s analysis, however,
according to Soloway and Chvotkin (2009), includes goods as opposed
to services. Soloway and Chvotkin conclude that both direct and indirect
employment is included in Light’s figures, and that the real figures are
less than generally assumed because of contractor overhead, spending on

equipment and so forth, but they do not offer a specific figure. Thus the
5.6 million contractor employees may be a smaller number, but no one is
arguing that it is as small as 1.8 million actual civil servants.
Kettl (2009) notes that the extent of contracting is such that 19 of the
20 programs most vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement,
according to the Government Accountability Office, are contracted out
in intricate public–private partnerships. Public–private partnerships are
substantially more difficult to manage than government agencies, and the
challenge facing government agencies to be the senior partner remains on
the table. In a classic case of management difficulty, the New York Times
noted that, in 2007, a State Department investigation of its contract in
Iraq with Blackwater was terminated after Blackwater’s top manager
there issued a threat: ‘that he could kill’ the government’s chief investiga-
tor and ‘no one could or would do anything about it’ (Risen, 2014).
Recent controversies over the number of contractors and the federal
government’s ability to supervise them have arisen not only in the national
security area, but over the development of the Obama administration’s
website for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), www.healthcare.gov,
the federal government’s lack of knowledge as to how many contractors
there actually are, and the cost of these contractors. Regarding the last,
the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) released a study in 2011
showing that contractors cost the federal government an average of 83
percent more than regular government employees doing the same jobs
(Project on Government Oversight, 2011).
The second challenge is one of the reasons contractors are hired to such
an extent: the inflexibility of the civil service rules, which favor contractors
over internal employees. Many agencies have caps on the total number
of employees overall, in spite of the growth of both the population and
the economy in the last two to three decades. The top pay for federal
employees is substantially less than the most skilled managers can earn in
the private sector. While the caps are politically popular, they also lead, as
Pearlstein (2014) points out, to a government where the best talent is in the
contractor community. The government, then, has a cap on the salaries
of those who work for it directly, but pays the higher salaries its caps are
designed to avoid through hiring contractors, who not only get the higher
salary, but the government pays for the company’s overhead and contrib-
utes to its profits as well. For a federal manager, contractors represent the
flexibility that is lacking in the federal civil service system: employees can
be terminated quickly, hired quickly, reassigned to different projects with
ease, and the like. So the typical agency in Washington and around the
country has both contractors and regular government employees in the
same building, sometimes in the same offices, keeping the same hours and

so forth. And reforming the civil service has become a partisan issue, with
Republicans supporting reforms and Democrats defending the existing
system.
The existing federal civil service system was built in the years following
World War II, some 65 or more years ago. Max Stier, president of the
Partnership for Public Service, was quoted in the Washington Post (2014)
saying, ‘Name an organization that is succeeding largely under the same
system that it had in 1949. It does not exist.’ The Washington Post editorial
points out that that the system is cumbersome, does not ‘recruit or compete
for talent and does not reward top performers or punish poor ones’.
The third challenge is in developing large projects, whether for phys
ical infrastructure or computer software. These are multi-billion-dollar,
multi-year, multiple levels of government, private sector or combinations
thereof projects that simply are much larger than the ‘normal’ govern-
mental endeavor. Examples include the new San Francisco–Oakland Bay
Bridge, the high-speed train in California, President Obama’s healthcare.
gov website, the ‘Big Dig’ freeway project in Boston, and other large
transportation and public projects around the USA.
American government is particularly ill designed to pursue such pro-
jects. Historically these projects have tended to cost many times the
initial estimates, take many times the proposed construction period to
build, and to have continued quality problems over the long run during
implementation. While most public sectors are ill equipped to deal with
long-term threats such as earthquakes, floods or other disasters, American
government, with its strong bias toward the status quo, is particularly ill
equipped, and there seems little appetite among the American public for a
wholesale revision of such cherished doctrines as the separation of powers
or ‘checks and balances’, or for revising the presidential system toward a
parliamentary system.
Complex government websites and software development projects are
the subject of the Standish Group’s database of several thousand such
projects, most of which had problems of one kind or another (Standish
Group, 2014). The Standish Group is a consulting firm that deals with the
performance of major software projects. The sorts of problems evidenced
by healthcare.gov, rolled out in the fall of 2013 to handle enrollments on
the federal health exchange for the states that chose not to build their own
exchanges, are unfortunately typical. Indeed, experts claim that the speed
that healthcare.gov was fixed is unusual: healthcare.gov is to be used by
middle-class clients and users, and was fixed relatively quickly. For similar
websites developed for the poor, such as those for food stamps or unem-
ployment insurance, the fixes can take many years (Robles, 2014; Klein,
2014). For many American states, the cumulative effect of years of budget

cuts, the inability to hire information technology personnel with high skill
levels, and low wages for those who administer programs for the poor has
left these states in situations difficult to remedy without the expenditure
of what, for them, are substantial amounts of new funds. Of course the
difference in political power and remedies is striking between the poor and
middle-and upper-middle-class citizens and probably accounts for much
of the difference.
A 2014 analysis of the new bridge connecting San Francisco and
Oakland indicated substantial problems of management in California’s
state government. The analysis, published in the Sacramento Bee, indi-
cated that the state agency chose a Chinese contractor that had never built
parts for a bridge before to fabricate the steel structure of the bridge. The
contractor ignored quality requirements built into the contract and fell
behind schedule, necessitating the expenditure of hundreds of millions of
dollars above the contract level. The result was a bridge that was years
behind schedule, costing more than twice the original price, and with
substantial doubts about its quality (Piller, 2014).
Among the most extensive analyses of megaprojects are those of
Flyvbjerg and his associates, who maintain that the only way to pursue
megaprojects rationally, given the poor history of past projects with
overruns and lack of demand, is to have extensive institutional reforms
(Flyvbjerg et al., 2003, 2009; also see Flyvbjerg, 2014). These would ensure
that the public sector is not both the promoter of the project and the
guarantor of its financing, and that private sector financing, without any
government guarantee, is included in every megaproject. Needless to say,
many megaprojects would not be feasible under such conditions, and the
political support to make such changes is certainly lacking in the USA.
Flyvbjerg found that megaprojects present a paradox in that larger
ones are being built around the world in spite of their poor performance
records in terms of cost, environmental impacts and public support. Both
psychological delusion and political deception occur in underestimating,
sometimes by huge amounts, the costs of such projects (Ansar et al., 2014).
Environmental impacts in practice are costly; these costs carry financial
risk in that they are underestimated at the time the project is being planned
and emerge only as projects are being implemented, when it may be dif-
ficult politically to cancel them. Government, in Flyvbjerg’s view, cannot
both promote a project and act as the ‘guardian of the public interest’ for
environmental, safety and financial risks. Another problem is that many
political systems allow so much interest-group involvement that groups
are able to guarantee themselves ‘a piece of the pie’. Flyvbjerg recom-
mends that public sector involvement be weakened to keep interest groups
from rent-seeking opportunities.

One frequent recommendation heard in reviews of megaproject devel-

opment is that the numerous environmental and regulatory hurdles that
such projects typically face be eliminated. This has been attempted in
several nations; the New Zealand experience from the 1970s is negative.
While regulations and sign-offs can be simplified or eliminated, the under-
lying problems recurred at later stages of the process (Anagnoson, 1985).
Another type of megaproject that has occurred frequently in recent
years in the USA is the public sector response to a major natural disaster.
Kettl (2009) contrasts the federal government’s performance respond-
ing to Hurricane Katrina, clearly a ‘mega-disaster’, with its performance
administering Medicare and Medicaid. He finds that the ‘system’ that
administers Medicare and Medicaid functions largely on its own and
is effective, but the disaster responsiveness system largely failed with
Hurricane Katrina. Of course, there is a big difference between the system
for senior citizens, which operates at a constant level of demand through
a single agency (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), and
the system for disaster responsiveness, which requires both a long-term
multilevel planning process as well as a drastic short-term increase in mul-
tilevel response planning and implementation capacity focused on certain
geographic locations affected by sudden disasters.
The administrative response improved from the dismal debacle in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005) to the somewhat improved
environment where aid was sent relatively quickly to New York and
New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (2012). Compounding the
response to Hurricane Katrina was the philosophy of the George W. Bush
administration, which adhered to a traditional federalism in which the
federal government would limit itself to supplementing individual states
as needed (and requested). Still, in each instance the response process was
very political, which complicated the administrative efforts that could best
be characterized as lacking in strategic capacity (McGuire and Schneck,
2010); with the effects of climate change seemingly more evident on the
seasonal calendar, the role of government and the processes of governance
will continue to be challenged in complex ways.
Several of the problems we have discussed could be called ‘wicked’; that
is, they span the jurisdictions of different government agencies, depart-
ments and networks, and they require the expenditure of substantial
amounts of money through time and across many different agencies and
contractors, making them particularly difficult to manage effectively.
American government at both the federal and state levels offers few
examples of effectiveness and efficiency in attacking such problems, and
numerous examples of poor implementation.

CONCLUSIONS
Given all of this, what are the factors that define the crucial, central
features of American public administration and its role in governance?
● High public expectations about the functioning of the executive

branch, combined with reluctance to see that government grow
‘large’ by historic American standards, and reluctance to provide
administrators with the resources and flexibility required to achieve
those expectations.
● Enormous complexity and non- standardization, so much so that
management challenges seem almost insurmountable, and any man-
agement effort faces opposition from parts of Congress as well as
from interest groups that benefit so strongly from the amount of
outsourcing. The complexity has grown so much since World War
II that Roosevelt’s administrators would scarcely recognize the
contemporary American administrative state. The wide distribution
of power, both down to the states and out to various interests, has
made management even more difficult. The increased significance of
the ‘submerged state’, characterized by indirect subsidies, contrib-
utes to the complexity.
● Many agencies have significant portions of their portfolios
outsourced. These pose significant management challenges.
● The level of distrust of government and its institutions is high and
has increased in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the
NSA spying revelations.
● The trend toward increasing centralization and power in the federal
government has continued, and recent Supreme Court cases have
assisted states not agreeing with the national majority in continuing
their divergent levels of services.
● Governance has become characterized by large expenditures that
subsidize corporate and wealthy individuals relatively invisibly
while redistributive programs for low-income persons are on the
cutting board every year.
● The role and view of public agencies in the USA changed drastic
ally during the Reagan administration (1981–89), from agencies
accountable to elected officials delivering public services, to agencies
that followed market principles and used nongovernmental partners
to deliver services.
It seems clear to us that the reasons why the public sector is not func-
tioning well in the USA are not fundamentally administrative – they are

political. With the country roughly equally divided between Republicans

and Democrats, between those seeking a significantly smaller government
with fewer services as opposed to a larger government with a significant
array of services, public administrators and executive branches are caught
in the middle. The conservative onslaught on big government includes
denigrating the civil service work and keeping from it the resources needed
to perform its functions, and clearly that attack over time has had a sig-
nificant impact. Agencies do not plan for an ambitious future; instead,
they cut costs relentlessly and try to keep the damage from spreading while
performing their core functions. The liberal impulse has not helped either,
as liberals have tried to expand government, add functions to agencies that
are already unable to perform effectively, and reinforce the public sector
unions in making the workforce less flexible and responsive (Zakaria,
2013).
The role of public administration in governance will need to address
capacity building, and we see administrative, organizational and politi-
cal consequences stemming from this role. Administratively, developing
the capacity to manage complexity – including contractor employees and
network relations – has become ‘Job No. 1’. Organizationally, managing
the mission and engaging with the community and in the organization’s
environment are evolving needs, and these require both a long- term
perspective and short-term energy because, as pressing as today’s needs
are, the calendar marches onward. The administrative and organiza-
tional imperatives facing public administration require applications of
the knowledge and skills of management, and here we face the challenge
of market principles surging into public practice over the past 35 years.
Therefore, politically, it will be important to ‘speak truth to power’ and
uphold democratic values while addressing the issues of the day, whether
in giving policy advice or engaging in implementation activities. What is
to be done? We return to our colleagues, Dvorin and Simmons, who had
the following advice for public administration education and practition-
ers (1972, p. 50):
It is suggested that the essence of the public is that individual who, in joining
with others in a body politic, creates the broader community. The essence of the
interest of that broader community is the dignity of each individual within it.
Only by a fundamental and searching reevaluation of its role in the community
of man can public administration become morally relevant. Unless the bureau-
cracy ‘throws its hat into the ring’ of public controversy as an active participant
which believes strongly in moral choices of its own derivation, it cannot justify
its exercise of power. It is the absence of the commitment to moral relevance, as
distinguished from relevance of action, that must be redressed.

REFERENCES
Agranoff, R. (2007), Managing within Networks: Adding Value to Public Organizations,

Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Anagnoson, J.T. (1982), ‘Federal grant agencies and congressional election campaigns’,
American Journal of Political Science, 26 (3), 547–61.
Anagnoson, J.T. (1985), ‘Can an industrialized society accelerate the processing of important
energy projects? New Zealand’s National Development Act’, Energy Systems and Policy,
9 (3), 249–70.
Andranovich, G. (1995), ‘Achieving consensus in public decision-making: applying interest-
based problem solving to intergovernmental collaboration’, Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science, 31 (4), 429–45.
Ansar, A., B. Flyvbjerg, A. Budzier and D. Lunn (2014), ‘Should we build more large dams?
The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development’, Energy Policy, 69 (March),
43–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.10.069 (accessed May 2014).
Breul, J.D. and J.M. Kamensky (2008), ‘Federal government reform: lessons from Clinton’s
“reinventing government” and Bush’s “management agenda” initiatives’, Public
Administration Review, 68 (6), 1009–26.
Bump, P. (2013), ‘America’s outsourced spy force, by the numbers’, The Atlantic Monthly,
10 June.
Clark, C.S. (2011), ‘OMB announces final guidance on inherently governmental func-
tions’, Government Executive, 9 September, http://www.govexec.com/oversight/2011/09/
omb-announces-final-guidance-on-inherently-governmental-functions/34878/ (accessed
30 May 2014).
Davidson, J. (2013), ‘Top contractor official leaves as contracting out falls and contracting
officers increase’, Washington Post, 19 January.
Denhardt, J.V. and R.B. Denhardt (2011), The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering, 3rd
edn, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Dvorin, E.P. and R.H. Simmons (1972), From Amoral to Humane Bureaucracy, San
Francisco, CA: Canfield Press (Harper & Row).
Federal News Radio (2012), ‘Inherently governmental guidance never made it off launch-
pad’, Washington, DC, 20 September. http://www.federalnewsradio.com/1011/3021045/
Inherently-governmental-guidance-never-made-it-off-launchpad (accessed 30 May
2014).
Flyvbjerg, B. (ed.) (2014), Mega-Project Planning and Management: Essential Readings, Vols.
1–2. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Flyvbjerg, B., M. Garbuio and D. Lovallo (2009), ‘Delusion and deception in large infra-
structure projects, two models for explaining and preventing executive disaster’, California
Management Review, 51 (2), Winter, 170–93.
Flyvbjerg, B., N. Bruzelius and W. Rothengatter (2003), Megaprojects and Risk, An Anatomy
of Ambition, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fukuyama, F. (1992), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press.
Gulick, L. (1937), ‘Notes on the theory of organization’, in L. Gulick and L. Urwick (eds),
Papers on the Science of Administration, New York: Institute of Public Administration,
pp. 191–5.
Gulick, L. and L. Urwick (1937), Papers on the Science of Administration, New York:
Institute of Public Administration.
Kamarck, E. (2013), Lessons for the Future of Government Reform, testimony before the
US Congress, House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform, accessed 29 December 2013, at http://www.brookings.edu/research/
testimony/2013/06/18-reinventing-government-future-reform-kamarck.
Kettl, D.F. (2002), The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for Twenty-
First Century America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kettl, D.F. (2009), The Next Government of the United States, Why Our Institutions Fail Us
and How to Fix Them. New York: Norton.

Klein, E. (2014), ‘Obamacare’s launch was bad. But many programs for the poor are worse’,
Washington Post, 7 January.
Light, P.C. (1999), The True Size of Government, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Light, P.C. (2000), ‘The true size of government and the next president’s challenge’,
Brookings Institution Policy Brief 65, October.
Light, P.C. (2003), ‘Fact sheet on the true size of government’, Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution, Center for Public Service. http://wagner.nyu.edu/light (accessed 26 May 2014).
Light, P.C. (2006), ‘The tides of reform revisited: patterns in making government work,
1945–2002’, Public Administration Review, 66 (1), 6–19.
McGuire, M. and D. Schneck (2010), ‘What if Hurricane Katrina hit in 2020? The need for
strategic management of disasters’, Public Administration Review, 70 (S-1), S201–7.
Mettler, S. (2011), The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine
American Democracy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Moynihan, D.P. and S. Lavertu (2012), ‘Does involvement in performance management
routines encourage performance information use? Evaluating GPRA and PART’, Public
Administration Review, 72 (4), 592–602.
Neiman, M. (2000), Defending Big Government, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Nice, D.C. and P. Frederickson (1995), The Politics of Intergovernmental Relations, 2nd edn,
Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall.
Novak, W.J. (2009), ‘Public–private governance: a historical introduction’, in J. Freeman
and M. Minow (2009), Government By Contract, Outsourcing and American Democracy,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 23–40.
Osborne, D. and T. Gaebler (1992), Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
is Transforming the Public Sector, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Patterson, J.T. (2012), The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America, New York:
Basic Books.
Pearlstein, S. (2014), ‘The federal outsourcing boom and why it’s failing Americans’,
Washington Post, 31 January.
Pew Research Center (2013), ‘Trust in government nears record low, but most federal agen-
cies are viewed favorably’, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and
Press. http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/10-18-13%20Trust%20in%20Govt%20
Update.pdf (accessed 4 July 2014).
Piller, C. (2014), ‘Bay Bridge’s troubled China connection’, Sacramento Bee, 8 June 2014.
Priest, D. and W.M. Arkin (2010), ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control’, Washington
Post. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-
growing-beyond-control/ (accessed 4 July 2014).
Project on Government Oversight (2011), ‘Bad business: billions of taxpayer dollars wasted
on hiring contractors’, Washington, DC: Project on Government Oversight. http://www.
pogo.org/our-work/reports/2011/co-gp-20110913.html (accessed 6 June 2014).
Risen, J. (2014), ‘Before shooting in Iraq, warning on Blackwater’, New York Times, 30 June.
Rivlin, A.M. (1992), Reviving the American Dream, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press.
Robles, F. (2014), ‘Faulty websites confront needy in search of aid’, New York Times, 7
January.
Schattschneider, E.E. (1960), The Semisovereign People, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
Simon, H. (1946), ‘The proverbs of administration’, Public Administration Review, 6 (1),
53–67.
Soloway, S. and A. Chvotkin (2009), ‘Federal contracting in context, what drives it, how to
improve it’, in J. Freeman and M. Minow (eds), Government By Contract, Outsourcing and
American Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 191–238.
Standish Group (2014), ‘Big bang boom, why large projects fail’, http://www.standishgroup.
com/ (accessed 6 June 2014).
Stillman, R.J. (1991), Preface to Public Administration, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Taylor, F.W. (1911), Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper & Brothers.

Thompson, J.R. (1999), ‘Devising administrative reform that works: the example of the
reinvention lab program’, Public Administration Review, 59 (4), 283–92.
Vandeventer, P. and M. Mandell (2011), Networks that Work: A Practitioner’s Guide to
Managing Networked Action, 2nd edn, Los Angeles, CA: Community Partners.
Wallerstein, E. (2003), The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World, New
York: The New Press.
Washington Post (2014), ‘The true VA scandal is shared across the federal government’,
Editorial, 26 May.
Wilson, W. (1887), ‘The study of administration’, Political Science Quarterly, 2 (2), 197–222.
Wright, D. (1988), Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, 3rd edn, New York:
Wadsworth.
Zakaria, F. (2013), ‘Why Americans hate their government’, Washington Post, 21 November.

10. Public administration in Brazil: structure,
reforms, and participation
Ricardo Corrêa Gomes and Leonardo Secchi
INTRODUCTION
The Brazilian experience on governance and government is presented in

this volume as Brazil has the fifth-largest territory, the fifth-largest popu-
lation and the seventh-largest economy in the world (CIA, 2013). The
public sector is large and still growing. To date, government spending
represents 18.2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) (Government
of Brazil, 2013b). In Brazil, tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is around
35 per cent, and the public sector absorbs 10.3 per cent of the Brazilian
labour force (OECD, 2010). Brazil is a federative republic, with a presi-
dential regime and a multiparty system. There are 32 political parties in
Brazil, 23 of which are represented in the Congress (Senate and Lower
Chamber).
In the last 50 years, Brazil has experienced important political changes.
In 1964, a military junta took control of the country; in 1985, democracy
was re-established; in 1988, the current Federal Constitution was promul-
gated; in 1989, the first democratic election for president took place after
roughly 30 years; from 1990 to 1995 three presidents took office with a
primary goal: to tackle the skyrocketing inflation. President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso managed to bring it down to plausible rates; in 2002,
the left-wing President Lula da Silva took office and managed to imple-
ment redistributive social policies and brought the country back on track
in terms of economic growth. Regarding public administration, the last
50 years have seen plenty of initiatives to inject new management tools
inspired by both new public management (NPM) and other domestic
innovations relating to citizens’ participation and public governance.
The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the Brazilian
public administration, its structure, historical background, and the
shifts of public administration models (administrative reforms). Brazil is
depicted as a mosaic of public administration models in which patrimo-
nial administration, traditional rational–legal administration, NPM and
public governance coexist in varied degrees across the complex Brazilian
federative structure. This chapter stresses the main feature of the current
226

Public administration in Brazil 227
Brazilian public administration – participation – achieved through the use

of a handful of civic engagement tools for public decision making.
The chapter is structured as follows. The next section presents the
current administrative structure of the country. The third section deals with
the series of reforms intended by Brazilian governments from a historical
perspective. The fourth section is an overview of governance in order to
provide a discursive explanation of Brazilian government efforts to ensure
public participation in government decisions. Finally, the conclusion pre-
sents an analysis of the rich mosaic of Brazil’s evolving public administra-
tion and participatory governance in a diverse and growing society.
THE CURRENT STRUCTURE OF THE BRAZILIAN

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
In 1822, an Act of Peter I declared the country independent from Portugal

and adopted the monarchy form of government. The first republican consti-
tution set down in 1824 indicated that the country had assumed the federa-
tive scheme of regional administrative structure. Brazil became a Republican
state from 1889, when the royal Portuguese family returned to Portugal.
Since then, the country has been a federation of relatively autonomous
states, and each state is composed of municipalities. To date, Brazil has 26
states, one federal district and 5569 cities (Government of Brazil, 2011).
To explain the complexities of government and governance in Brazil, we
will briefly describe the structure of the public administration, outlining
the powers of government and their relationship with each other and with
the central government.
Administrative Structure
The 26 states in Brazil are scattered across five regions. This does not
denote an additional administrative structure, but rather a means for
understanding cultural, economic and social issues. The regions are:
● North, comprising the states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará,

Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins;
● Northeast, comprising the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Ceará,
Maranhão, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Piaui, Rio Grande do Norte and
Sergipe;
● Centre-west, comprising the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato
Grosso do Sul and the federal district in which it is located: the
capital of the country – Brasília;

853
645
497
417 399
295
246217 223 224
184 185 167
141 144 139
102 78 79 92 75
22 62 52
16 15
Acre
Alagoas
Amapá
Amazonas
Bahia
Ceará
Espirito Santo
Goiás
Maranhão
Mato Grosso
Mato Grosso do Sul
Minas Gerais
Pará
Paraiba
Paraná
Pernambuco
Piaui
Rio de Janeiro
Rio Grande do Norte
Rio Grande do Sul
Rondônia
Roraima
Santa Catarina
São Paulo
Sergipe.
Tocantins
Figure 10.1 Brazilian states and the number of municipalities
● Southeast, comprising the states of Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais,

Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; and
● South, comprising the states of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and
Santa Catarina.
Municipalities are the smaller administrative units that form each state.
Since the 1988 Federal Constitution, the process of creating more munici-
palities was no longer under state government control, and is now
determined by public consultation (referendum) with the involved local
population. This has raised the number of municipalities to a great extent
(Tomio, 2002) – from 3964 in 1980 to 5565 in 2010 (Government of Brazil,
2011). To date, Minas Gerais has the greatest number of municipalities:
853 units, followed by São Paulo (645 municipalities), and Rio Grande do
Sul (497 municipalities). Figure 10.1 shows the distribution of municipali-
ties, totalling 5569 (Government of Brazil, 2013a). We now turn attention
to how public administration is structured in each of the three levels of
government, namely federal, state and municipal.
The Powers of Government
Drawing on Montesquieu’s definition of power (Claus, 2005), there are

three powers in Brazil: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary. In
theory, they are by definition autonomous and independent from each

other, and they have to accept each other’s decisions in order to maintain
the balance of power.
Executive power is exercised by an elected politician who is in charge
of the whole decision-making process of public administration, composed
of ministries (federal government) or secretaries (state/municipality), and
public agencies in all policy sectors.
The executive mandate is for a four-year term, with the possibility to
run for re-election. It is worth mentioning that the law forbids a stay in
power of more than eight years, but this does not apply when periods of
administration are not consecutive. Executive power is present in the three
spheres of government with different denominations, namely president
for federal government, governor for state government, and mayor for
municipality administration. Each of these positions has a deputy, a politi-
cian elected along with the executive head, who takes control in the case
of absence, resignation or death of the first person. The president is both
head of government and head of state.
Elected politicians compose legislative power, and there are no obstacles
to successive mandates. As long as they are re-elected, they can participate
in new legislation. Legislative power is also presented in the three spheres
of government. In the federal government, there are two houses that
represent the people: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. In state
government, there is only the Legislative Assembly; representatives are
called ‘state deputies’. In municipal governments, legislative power resides
in the Municipal Chamber – the representatives are known in Brazil as
Vereadores (rough translation of ‘aldermen’).
Judges are formally appointed by the executive power and approved
by the legislative power, and they are in charge of the judiciary power in
Brazil. In contrast to the other positions, as soon as a judge is appointed
to head the Tribunal, s/he is entitled to stay in situ for all his/her profes-
sional life up to retirement (at the age of 70). Also, in contrast to the
other powers, there are tribunals only at federal and state governments.
The administrative structures, as well as competencies, are dealt with as
follows.
Competencies and Administrative Structures of the Three Powers
The whole set of competencies for the three powers is set down in the 1988
Federal Constitution (Government of Brazil, 1992). One main difference
between public and private administration in Brazil is that public manag-
ers are expected to do only things that are formally defined by law. To
this end, a federal constitution regulates the federal government, a state
constitution regulates the states, and a municipal constitution (called Lei

Orgânica) regulates municipalities. It is worth mentioning that, according

to the legal hierarchy, both state and municipal constitutions must comply
with the rules set down by the Federal Constitution (Pietro, 2013). The
next subsection outlines each power, describing how it works in each of
the spheres of government.
Executive power
The federal government The president, the vice president and the minis-
tries, who work as a staff for the president, compose the executive power in
the federal government. The president and his/her ministries comprise the
so-called direct public administration, which has this label to denote all
the administrative functions directly subordinated to the executive power
(Pietro, 2013). Alongside the direct administrative structure, the legislation
allows the creation of other entities to help administer services and policies
to society. These organizations perform decentralized activities according
to their juridical nature. They have a president, who is appointed by the
president of Brazil and approved by the Senate, and boards for oversee-
ing finances and approving their strategic plans. In Brazil, to date, there
are four types of organizations involved in indirect administration: public
enterprises; public foundations; autarchies; and joint-stock corporations.
While all these are managed according to the same legal framework as
for the direct administration, there are some differences in the way they
operate. For instance, joint-stock corporations, of which Petrobras is an
example, have the right to attract investments from the markets by selling
shares.
In terms of competencies, the 1988 Federal Constitution laid down that
it is in the federal government remit to manage issues related to Brazil
as a nation; that is, for example, to sign a peace treaty or to engage in
war, to ensure national security, to have oversight over the money supply
and to manage the whole set of financial activities, and to control the
media, among other competencies, as stated in Article 21 of the Federal
Constitution. In order to ensure coverage of its expenditures, the federal
government is entitled to collect money from several sources, the most
important being the individual revenue tax, which is a percentage of gross
salary,1 and the industrial production tax, which is a percentage of every
product sold in the country.
State governments State governments have the same administrative

structure as the federal government. They have a governor and a vice gov-
ernor, who is an elected citizen in charge of general decision making for
a period of four years, with the opportunity to be re-elected for an equal

period. The vice governor is entitled to substitute for the governor in his/
her absence. The governor can appoint secretariats for staff, which can be
as numerous as needed and are approved by the Legislative Assemblies.
States also have the power to create organizations to deal with the indirect
administration of the state; these organizations must follow the same legal
framework as those in the federal government.
The state is responsible for several activities within its territory; the most
important of these are: security, including police and fire services; second-
ary education (the federal government is responsible for higher education
by funding public and regulating private education); some participation
in health services, mainly in terms of hospitals; and so on. States are enti-
tled to collect some tax in order to meet expenditures; the most valuable
revenue stream is the circulation of goods and services tax.
Municipal governments Elected mayors and their vice mayors are head of
the municipal government. They are also entitled to appoint secretariats
as staff. There is no limit to the number of secretariats, as long as they
are approved by the Municipal Chamber. The mayor is responsible for a
set of public services, such as primary education, social assistance, urban
planning, waste collection and disposal, road maintenance, environment
and housing, among others. In Brazil, the municipal constitution is called
the ‘Organic Law’; it defines the whole general legal framework regulat-
ing municipal matters. Municipalities are entitled to collect local taxes;
the most representative are property and service sales tax in order to meet
expenditure at local level. As in the other spheres of government, munici-
palities are entitled to create indirect organizations for the provision and
control of public services.
Legislative power
The legislative power has the responsibility to create the legal framework
under which the whole set of activities of public administration must be
carried out, and to oversee the executive power. Laws are created by pro-
posal of the representative, or by initiative of the executive power (Pietro,
2013). However, in both cases the legislative power has the final word on
approval of the laws.
Legislative power at the federal government level At the federal govern-

ment level, the legislative power is exerted by the National Congress,
composed of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house) and by the Senate.
The first is the assembly that sends representatives for each state according
to their population size. The minimum number of representatives is eight,
and the maximum is 70 (Government of Brazil, 1992). Three senators for

each state and for the federal district compose the Senate. Some matters
are discussed by the National Congress as a whole, which is the case for
presidential impeachment, declaration of war, and some other issues
defined by Article 49 of the 1988 Federal Constitution. Other matters,
such as federal laws, are discussed and approved first in the Chamber of
Deputies and then in the Senate for final enactment by the president. The
legislative power has the prerogative to control government activities and
procedures, and it has the Federal Court of Accounts that oversees federal
government (direct and indirect bodies) accountability.
Legislative power at the state government level The legislative power

works in the same way in the state as in the federal government. It is
in charge of approving laws and plans, as well as holding state govern-
ment accountable to the legal framework. For this task, the Legislative
Assemblies also have accountancy tribunals to which documents and
records are sent for assessment and accountability.
Legislative power at the municipal government level In terms of operation,

the legislative power works in the same way as at the local level, but there
is no tribunal to ensure accountability of the municipal administration.
The states accountancy tribunal carries out this activity.2 The Municipal
Chamber (Câmara de Vereadores) has the role of approving local laws,
plans and regulations, as well as enforcing the Organic Law. It is also in
charge of approving the municipal administration accounts as the first
instance.
Judiciary power
As stated earlier, judiciary power resides in the federal and state govern-
ment spheres, but not in the municipal government sphere. The highest
court of judgment is the Federal Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal
Federal – STF) as the court of last instance and the guardian of the
Federal Constitution (Government of Brazil, 1992). Besides the STF,
several courts of justice compose the judiciary power: the Superior Court
of Justice, Regional Federal Courts and their federal judges, Work
Relations Courts and their judges, Electoral Courts and their judges,
Military Courts and their judges, State Courts and their judges and,
finally, the Federal District Court. Next, the roles and competencies of the
courts are described.
Judiciary power at the federal government level Although there is no hier-

archy in municipal, state and federal governments, the judiciary process
must follow the hierarchy of the law, and every appeal finishes when it

reaches the STF. Another important institution in the Brazilian judiciary

system is the Superior Court of Justice (STJ). Both the STF and the STJ
are courts of last instance of appeal; the main difference between them is
that the former is the court of last instance for issues related to the Federal
Constitution and the latter for other situations. But, in the end, the judges
of the STF make the final decision.
As stated earlier, the STF is entitled to judge offences perpetrated by
the president, vice president, ministries of state, senators and federal
legislators, while the STJ has the power to judge states and the federal
district governors. However, even governors and mayors are also entitled
to appeal to the STF, if they claim that their individual rights have been
offended according to Article 5 of the Federal Constitution (Moraes,
2013).
The federal courts have the competence to judge appeals in which the
federation and the direct and indirect administration are involved. The
other superior courts, namely electoral, work relations and military,
are courts of last instance in matters of their competencies. But, again,
the STF is likely to be invoked where individual rights and the Federal
Constitution requirements are not fully followed.
Judiciary power at the state government level According to the 1988

Federal Constitution, state tribunals must be regulated by states constitu-
tions. They are formed by judges and they have the competence to judge
appeals against decisions made by the first-instance judges. As stated
earlier, municipalities do not have courts, but they do have a judge to
cover justice in their territories. These judges are subordinated to state
courts and their decisions can only be revoked by decision of the higher
bodies. Some small municipalities (in terms of population size) share the
same judge with other, also small, municipalities; this judge is in charge of
civil, criminal and electoral matters.
The Prosecution Service and its Roles in the Three Levels of Government
According to the 1988 Federal Constitution, the Department of Public

Prosecution (Ministério Público) is an essential and permanent institution
for ensuring the defence of the juridical order, the democratic regime and
social and individual interests. To do this, the public prosecution system
is structured into federal and states attorneys. In the federal sphere,
Public Prosecution is composed of the Federal Public Attorney, the Work
Relations Public Attorney, the Military Public Attorney, and the Federal
District Public Attorney. In accordance with the judicial system, each state
also has its own Department of Public Prosecution.

In overall terms, the Public Prosecutor holds competency for promot-

ing public penal actions in order to ensure civil rights, the right to access
public services as well as ensuring their quality, to ensure that the Federal
Constitution is fully obeyed, and to exert external control over federal,
state and municipal authorities. This institution is very important for the
health and functioning of the public institutions, and public attorneys
have the following rights ensured by the 1988 Federal Constitution: tenure
in the exercise of the function after two years; not be removed from juris-
diction unless required by the public institutions; and irreducibility of
remuneration. Any decision contrary to what is stated in the Constitution
must be approved by the full collegiate of the last instance within the
public attorney system (Government of Brazil, 1992).
In this chapter so far, we have presented the legal and administrative
framework that guides the Brazilian public administration. The main aim
of the chapter is to depict the whole system of rules and authorities that
govern the country in the three spheres of government. In the next section,
we discuss emerging values in Brazilian public administration and efforts
to engage citizens in government policy and public service delivery.
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN BRAZIL
Administrative reform is a perennial exercise in Brazilian public admin-

istration (see Figure 10.2). Since 1938, when President Getúlio Vargas
undertook the first major initiative of rationalization and organization
of the Brazilian Federal Public Administration, virtually every federal
Colony Monarchy Republic

15
18
18
19
19 – M
00
22
89
64
85 ili
–
–
A
In
Pr
R ry
rr
ed co
de
oc
iv
em up
ta
pe
la
al
m
nd
oc
of
at
ra
en
io
Po
tiz
ce
n
rtu
a
of
fro
tio
gu
th
m
n
es
eR
Po
es
ep
rtu
et
ub
tle
ga
lic
rs
l
to
Br
az
il
Figure 10.2 Timeline of milestones in Brazilian history

government attempted to push forward administrative reforms (Lustosa

da Costa, 2008).
‘Administrative reform’, however, is a term that may have various con-
notations. Throughout Brazilian history, administrative reform has meant
formalizing procedures, cost reduction, simplification of procedures and
privatization. Some politicians have also used the term ‘administrative
reform’ to mean changes in the functions of departments or ministries, or
even to suggest an overall change in the composition of the cabinet.
To ensure understanding, the term ‘administrative reform’ is used here
to refer to changes in public management policies and in the design of
programmatic organizations, bound by a reasonable degree of coherence
in values and rhetoric. This definition is based on the theoretical contribu-
tions of Barzelay (2000, 2001), and Hood and Jackson (1991). In other
words, an administrative reform is an attempt to change a management
model based on some kind of value (equity, efficiency, effectiveness or
resilience) in order to change practices in human resource management,
financial management, information and communication technology
(ICT), marketing, procurement, organization design, participation, pri-
vatization, marketization and inter- organizational implementation of
public policies. Using this concept, the Brazilian federal government
witnessed only two attempts at administrative reform, detailed below.
1. Administrative reform of Getúlio Vargas in 1938 – transition from

patrimonial form of administration to progressive public administra-
tion (PPA)
As seen earlier, Brazil has long been held hostage to pre-bureaucratic

forms of administration inherited from the Portuguese Crown. The charac-
teristics of this patrimonial model are confusion between public and private
property, patronage, nepotism and gerontocracy (March, 1961). On taking
power in 1930, President Getúlio Vargas imposed measures to rationalize
public administration. To this end, in 1938 the Department of Public Service
Administration (DASP) was created as a federal agency to design and imple-
ment public management policies in the areas of human resource manage-
ment, financial management and budgeting. DASP was also expected to
review the administrative structures and working procedures in the federal
government (Bresser-Pereira, 1996). These initiatives were based on the
Weberian rational–legal model and were also known as progressive public
administration – PPA (Hood, 1995). The rhetoric related to this admin-
istrative reform was consistent with the group of theta values, are related
to equity, fairness, mutuality, neutrality, accountability and avoidance of
abuse by the agent (dishonesty, carelessness) (Hood and Jackson, 1991).

It can be argued that the PPA model had its big push forward in the
Vargas era, but is still being implemented at the time of writing (2013).
Measures for ex ante control of public agents, and for the promotion of
the administrative efficiency, can be observed at all levels of direct and
indirect government. Recent examples of the adoption of this Weberian
bureaucratic model are measures such as the Regime Júridico Único dos
Servidores, which guarantees job stability for agents in indirect adminis-
tration; the 1993 Law 8.666, which restricted procurement procedures in
the public sector; and the 2000 Fiscal Responsibility Law, which reduced
the autonomy of elected officials in public expenditure decisions (mainly
for raising expenditures to meet the cost of personnel). Even today, state
and municipal administrations throughout Brazil use the legal–rational
mindset, which becomes a management model, to implement new restric-
tions, to impose neutrality, and to avoid abuse by public agents.
2. Administrative reform of Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira in 1995 – transi-

tion from PPA model to NPM
Throughout the twentieth century, Brazil sought to reject pre-

bureaucratic forms of administration. While adopting PPA, bureaucratic
dysfunctions became evident (Merton, 1949). Initiatives to reduce red
tape were taken in 1967 and in 1980, during the dictatorship government
(Abrucio, 2007). However, the great effort towards administrative change
started in 1995, during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration,
in which Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira took charge of the creation of the
Ministry of Administration and Reform of the State (MARE) and the
Master Plan for State Reform. Bresser-Pereira imported the New Public
Management model as a solution to replace ‘a bureaucratic public admin-
istration, slow and inefficient, for a managerial public administration,
decentralized, efficient, dedicated to responding to the demands of citi-
zens’ (Bresser-Pereira, 1996, p. 26). The rhetoric of the managerial reform
conducted by Bresser-Pereira was related to the group of sigma values
related to efficiency, rational allocation of resources and simplicity (Hood
and Jackson, 1991) (see Figure 10.3).
Among the measures that have been included in the Master Plan for
State Reform were the privatization of public enterprises, contracting out
public services to non-profit organizations, strengthening strategic-level
careers (policy analysts, financial managers), fiscal adjustment, simplifi-
cation of procedures, performance measurement (Bresser-Pereira, 1996;
Resende, 2002; Abrucio, 2007; Lustosa da Costa, 2008).
The general assessment of Bresser-Pereira’s reform is controversial.
Privatization in sectors such as communications, mining and energy was

HR management
Financial management
Public Management
ICT/E-government policies
Marketing
Procurement
Administrative reforms
Organizational design
Participation
Design of programmatic
Privatization
organizations
Marketization
Interorg. implementation
Source: Secchi (2008).
Figure 10.3 The components of the administrative reforms
undertaken. The strengthening of strategic careers in the federal govern-

ment and contracting out to social organizations for the implementation
of public services also achieved relative success. However, hopes for fiscal
adjustment, for reducing red tape and for improving decision-making
autonomy were not fulfilled.
The subordination of institutional changes to the most pressing issues
of economic development, and the subsequent election of President
Lula, who had little sympathy for managerial reforms, meant that
Bresser-Pereira’s reform had limited impact on the federal administration
(Abrucio, 2007; Resende, 2002).
One of the great spillovers of the reforms, however, was the strengthen-
ing of knowledge and debate in the field. As a result, the theme has received
attention from the public and from academia; undergraduate and gradu-
ate courses in public administration have proliferated throughout Brazil;

academic and practitioner conferences are now continually organized to

discuss ‘administrative reform’ and ‘innovations in the public sector’.
Consequently, public management policies became an important issue
for political leaders’ arguments and actions. Candidates for state govern-
ments, such as Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Pernambuco and Santa Catarina,
emphasized public management policies and the design of programmatic
organizations. Bresser-Pereira mostly failed in his endeavour, but ‘admin-
istrative reform’ has been an issue on the public agenda as never before in
Brazilian history.
PARTICIPATION: THE CORE COMPETENCE OF

BRAZILIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Brazil is recognized, in the international literature, as a living experiment

on participation mechanisms (Abers, 2000; Avritzer, 2008). Participation
refers to the involvement of non-state actors in the policy-making process.
In other words, participation means the involvement of civil society in
identifying public problems, designing alternatives, making decisions, and
implementing and evaluating public policies.
Initiatives to increase civil society involvement in public matters have
no single root, or single entrepreneur. Several initiatives were taken by the
Congress and by the federal government, and also by state and municipal
governments. They are implemented to varying degrees. The diffusion
of participation as a policy design mechanism is a case of multicentric
experimentalism.
The generation of this competence was a product of the following
context:
● The military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985
had an impact on the centralization of power (at the federal level),
and on the concentration of power in the hands of the ruler.
● The lack of reliability of representative democracy and the bad
image of the Congress, politicians and political parties (Almeida,
2007) fostered hopes that direct democracy would increase the
legitimacy of decisions.
● Organized civil society is active in Brazil. Civil society was long
responsible for an important share of public services, such as
public health, education, environmental protection, culture and
assistance to the poor, before the state started to increase its
participation.
● Church- related charities, non-governmental organizations, unions

and business federations have claimed their positions in designing

public policies at all three levels of government since democratiza-
tion in 1985.
Since 1985, and after the 1988 Federal Constitution, several mechanisms
for civic engagement in the elaboration of public policies have prolifer-
ated. Among them are policy councils, national conferences, participatory
budgeting, and participation in the construction of urban master plans
(planos diretores). They are briefly presented as follows.
Policy Councils (Conselhos de Políticas Públicas)
The 1988 Federal Constitution institutionalized this type of participa-

tory body at all levels of government, to define and evaluate public
policies in several areas. At the same time, it gave non-state actors the
opportunity to discuss and decide public policies along with govern-
ment officials. The most visible policy councils are Education, Health,
Social Assistance, Child and Youth, Culture, Economic Development
and Environment. Virtually every ministry at the federal level has a
policy council attached to it. The same logic applies to municipalities
and state government: the executive body headed by the municipal (or
state) secretary is advised by policy councils to define the general policy
and evaluate its outcomes.
The composition and power of policy councils varies from case to case.
In general, they are formed by representatives from government (mainly
bureaucrats or appointees), and representatives from society, mainly
users/citizens, unions, universities and NPOs. Some policy councils have
deliberative status, and their decisions are mandatory on the executive
body. Others are merely advisory, making recommendations to govern-
ment. Their composition and power depend on the regulation by which
the body at the local, state or federal level has been created.
Some policy councils are mandatory for subnational levels of author-
ity. According to the Brazilian legislation, municipal governments must
create policy councils on Health, Education and Social Assistance. If not,
the federal government can stop the transfer of money for some specific
programmes.3
Policy councils increase participation and social accountability. At the
federal and state levels, and in larger cities, council members represent
important sectors of society. They are in charge of the policy issues at
hand. They are experienced managers, and they collaborate effectively in
the decision-making process. In smaller cities, policy councils vary in par-
ticipation and effectiveness. Studies have identified some critical aspects

that inhibit the policy councils’ goals, such as a low participation culture
among the population, lack of information and expertise to make a differ-
ence at meetings, and the capture of the policy council by high demanders
or ‘preference outliers’ (Allebrandt, 2003; Secchi, 2006). Even in small
towns, a positive spillover effect is the creation of co-responsibility and
mutual learning in council meetings, and the rise of technical debate in
frequently politicized arenas.
Participatory Budget (Orçamento Participativo)
Participatory budget is a decision-making mechanism that some cities

employ for deciding investments. It has been created and disseminated
in cities controlled by the Workers’ Party. The most visible experiment
took place in Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.5 million, the capital
of Rio Grande do Sul – a southern state. It mixed a historically engaged
community with the sympathy of a left-wing party towards participatory
mechanisms (Avritzer, 2008).
Basically, the mechanism works as follows: city officials organize
forums in every district or neighbourhood to determine top priorities for
infrastructural investments – building new schools, streets, health centres
and other public services. The resident population is invited to participate
in regional forums. The community proposes or rejects the alternatives,
and there are no restrictions or barriers to citizen participation. After
a first round at the regional forums, the Executive Commission for the
Participatory Budget organizes a second round of discussions (the City
Assembly) in order to collate all the demands, aiming to balance the
investment options chosen by different neighbourhoods, and avoiding
duplication of investment for the next fiscal year.
The participatory budget has no influence on matters such as salaries
and benefits, administrative costs and tax revenues. The advantage of
participatory budgeting is the access to decision making (Fung, 2006). A
significant part of the municipal budget is decided within the community,
shifting the power from behind closed doors in City Hall. Another gain
is the sense of belonging. After two decades of dictatorship, and even
with discredited legislative power, the citizenry feel that they finally have
a voice in public decision making. This is not a trivial breakthrough in
Brazil. The main criticism of participatory budgeting is the lack of discus-
sion of overall policies and public services to the citizenry. Big investments
that could benefit the whole city are not subject to the mechanism. Vaz
(2002, pp. 276–7) claimed that the mechanism ‘does not take into consid-
eration the great investments, administrative costs of the public service
and public policies’.

Despite some limitations, participatory budgeting is considered a

benchmark to increase public governance and co-production. More than
150 cities in Brazil have adopted the mechanism, and today it is one of
Brazil’s most discussed and exported examples of innovation in public
decision making.
Urban Master Plan (Plano Diretor)
The plano diretor is the urban master plan that every municipality has to
develop in order to map preservation, residential, commercial areas and
spaces for urban expansion. It serves as the territorial zoning plan for the
municipality. The participatory outlook is mandatory since a federal law
was enacted in 2001 (the so-called Estatuto da Cidade), which states that
the formulation of the plano diretor must be built with the participation of
community.
The origins of the plano diretor go back to Movimento Nacional pela
Reforma Urbana (National Movement for Urban Reform), which, since
the 1960s, has gathered non- profit organizations, unions, local asso-
ciations and professional associations to push for regulation of land use,
recovery of degraded urban areas (favelas) and the preservation of the
urban environment (Avritzer, 2008). This movement was able to influence
the agenda during the formulation of the 1988 Federal Constitution and
Estatuto da Cidade in 2001, which included the plano diretor as the major
urban planning mechanism.
After 2001, all cities with more than 20 000 inhabitants started a partici-
patory process to formulate, through public hearings, their plano diretor.
Public hearings are held in order to understand community problems, to
elaborate policy alternatives, and to take final decisions on land use. All
citizens are invited to participate, but the more affluent actors are com-
munity associations, non-profit organizations and, naturally landlords,
developers and realtors. The wave of participation in designing each plano
diretor started in 2001 and reached more than 1000 municipalities, affect-
ing more than 120 million inhabitants. It is regarded as one of the largest
experiments in direct participation ever undertaken.
National Conferences (Conferências Nacionais)
National conferences (conferências nacionais) are initiatives taken by the

federal government to consult the population on several public policy
areas. National conferences happen from the bottom, from municipalities,
to states, and then up to the federal level. They are organized in policy
areas such as health, education and public safety, or in many specific

policy issues such as racial equality, fisheries and aquaculture, or health

care for the indigenous population.
National conferences have taken place in Brazil since the time of Getúlio
Vargas. Health was the first policy area to organize national conferences in
the 1940s. Since Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) and, especially
with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–10), national conferences have become
a constant channel for building dialogue with civil society for proposing
national policies. Since then, more than 100 national conferences have
been held (Avritzer, 2012). National conferences happen as follows. The
ministry of any area (health, safety, environment etc.) creates an organizing
committee for the national conference in that policy area. Representatives
of the government and from civil society comprise this committee. The
committee is expected to design the conference statute, including deadlines,
regulation for electing representatives and the participatory methodology.
Each municipality voluntarily organizes a conference and elects the repre-
sentatives. At the state level, the municipal representatives gather to discuss
common problems, to build policy proposals, and to elect state representa-
tives who will attend the national conference. Finally, the state representa-
tives gather at the national conference for a few days, preparing the Final
Report. This document is the main product of the national conference. It
has no legal value, but serves as a policy report for congressmen, and for
the executive branch of the federal government itself to develop its policies.
The discussion is deliberative; reasons and arguments are put forward
in an attempt to build a consensus among the various actors. Studies have
shown that national conferences are very effective. The knowledge gener-
ated by the deliberative rounds at the local, state and national levels is
absorbed as input for the formulation of national policies (Pogrebinschi,
2010; Avritzer, 2012).
CONCLUSION: THE BRAZILIAN MOSAIC
Presenting an overview of the prevailing public management model in

Brazil is a hard task. Brazil is a large and diverse country, with many forms
of public administration. The heterogeneity is such that the ‘management
model’ employed in the Ministry of Finance or Ministry of Planning,
which has a numerous and highly skilled workforce, is totally different
from that of the Ministry of Health, or that of the Ministry of Education,
which does not have a consolidated bureaucracy and relies on specialized
and decentralized structures in states and municipalities.
If it is difficult to draw a synthesis of management models in ministries
that are located within a mile of each other in Brasília, to compare the public

administration of São Paulo – a city with over 10 million inhabitants – with

Quixadá – a city with 80 000 inhabitants located in the impoverished hinter-
land of Ceará (northeastern of Brazil) – is like comparing oranges to apples.
The picture is even more complex if we widen the discussion to other
powers, such as legislative and judiciary in various states of the federation.
All organs of indirect administration, such as the federal public university
with over 50 000 students, the highly professional public bank system
in Brazil and the poorly structured utility companies, live in completely
different worlds, so to speak.
The synthesis of this canvas is a mosaic. Brazil is a mosaic and its
public administration is a consequence of that. What management model
predominates in Brazilian public administration? In order to address this
question, we have to look at the specific organ, to the specific power, to the
specific region or state of the federation.
In general, poorer and smaller municipalities are still hostages to old
clientelistic practices, and they are currently undergoing an effort to adopt
PPA, and banning patrimonialism. This effort is imposed by federal regu-
lation, such as the Regime Júridico Único dos Servidores, the 1993 Law
8666, and the 2000 Fiscal Responsibility Act. This shift is also an outcome
of a maturing society that has been slowly realizing that government
officials must be held accountable.
In the federal government, and in some states, such as Minas Gerais
and Pernambuco, and even in some cities, such as Curitiba and São Paulo,
NPM tools have been adopted, in the form of more autonomy for manage-
rial decisions, performance-related pay and privatization. Public govern-
ance initiatives, on the other hand, are present at all levels of government.
It can be said that the image of Brazilian public administration is public
governance, co-production, policy networks and citizen participation.
Values and doctrines of public governance are present in mechanisms for
citizen participation as mentioned: policy councils, national conferences,
participatory budgeting and participation in the construction of urban
master plans. These participatory mechanisms focus on the process of
formulating and evaluating public policies. As for the implementation of
public policies, examples are the participation of civic organizations in the
delivery of education, environment and health care services. Other exam-
ples of implementation are public–private partnerships as a way of sharing
risks and benefits in the construction of highways, railways and soccer sta-
diums for the FIFA World Cup 2014. In Brazil, inter-organizational imple-
mentation of policies is a necessary means for facing the state’s inability to
cope alone with the growing and diverse demands of society.
The most interesting phenomenon in Brazilian public governance
has been happening inductively, through innovative experimentation in

municipalities, in states and at the federal level. Unlike what happened

with the adoption of the PPA after the 1930s, or with the adoption of
NPM since 1995, the Brazilian public governance model is sui generis. It
was born and raised during different initiatives of political parties, differ-
ent levels of government, and has had to cope with the pressure of a civil
society jaded by centralism and illegitimate representativeness.
The Brazilian participation experiences are unique – born, tested
and improved locally. There was no inspiration from foreign literature
or foreign experiences of public governance, or policy networks or co-
production (Rhodes, 1997; Börzel, 1998; Whitaker, 1980). What happened
is a combination of what was empirically experienced in Brazil in the last
20 years, and the rise of a normative international literature of public
administration arguing for less hierarchical, and more participatory and
collaborative elaboration of public policies.
Some countries have attempted to apply deductively the concepts
of public governance. In Brazil, the process goes the other way round:
an experimentation that goes upwards, synchronized with the lack of
legitimacy of public administration and representation.
The symbolic and practical value of participation had such force in
Brazil that it has led to ‘democratitis’ – a pejorative term used to denote
excessive participation in all technical and political decisions, which can
lead to slow decision making as a result of repeated and ineffective discus-
sions. Democratitis is the inability to make managerial decisions, and the
inertial tendency to bring any kind of discussion to the general public.
Despite this participatory fame, the predominance of the public govern-
ance model is not the reality in Brazilian public administration. Again,
the better image of Brazilian public administration is the mosaic: patri-
monialism, PPA, NPM and public governance stand side by side. In some
places, the amount of patrimonialism may be greater. In other areas, such
as consolidated public administrations (Ministry of Planning, Ministry of
Finance), in indirect administration, and in the judiciary, the PPA model
stands out. The NPM was applied to the federal government, and in some
states and city governments enchanted with its rhetoric of efficiency, effec-
tiveness and streamlined management. Public governance, co-production
and participation are also applied variously throughout Brazilian public
administration, depending on the political party in office, the strength of
civil society and the size of the political community.
NOTES
1. People whose salary is under R$1637.11 (£460/month), are exempted from this tax.

2. The only exceptions are the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two largest cities.
They have their own municipal account tribunal, linked to the legislative power of the
city.
3. Due to an intricate fiscal system, the majority of Brazilian municipalities depend heavily
on transfers from upper-level governments. Larger cities rely mostly on their own prop-
erty and service taxes, but the smaller municipalities are, the higher their dependence on
transfers.
REFERENCES
Abers, R.N. 2000. Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil. Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Abrucio, F.L. 2007. Trajetória recente da gestão pública Brasileira: um balanço crítico e a ren-
ovação da agenda de reformas. Revista de Administração Pública, Edição Comemorativa
Especial 1967–2007, 67–86.
Allebrandt, S.L. 2003. Conselhos municipais: potencialidades e limites para a efetividade
e eficácia de um espaço público para a construção da cidadania interativa. Proceedings.
XXVII Encontro Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração, Atibaia – São
Paulo.
Almeida, A.C. 2007. A Cabeça do Brasileiro. São Paulo: Record.
Avritzer, L. 2008. Instituições participativas e desenho institucional: algumas considerações
sobre a variação da participação no Brasil democrático. Opinião Pública, 14(1), 43–64.
Avritzer, L. 2012. Conferências nacionais: ampliando e redefinindo os padrões de partici-
pação social no Brasil. Texto Para Discussão 1739, Rio de Janeiro: Ipea.
Barzelay, M. 2000. The New Public Management: a bibliographical essay for Latin American
(and other) scholars. International Public Management Journal, 3, 229–65.
Barzelay, M. 2001. The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue.
Berkeley, CA and New York: University of California Press/Russell Sage Foundation.
Börzel, T.A. 1998. Le reti di attori pubblici e privati nella regolazione Europea. Stato e
Mercato, 54(3), 389–432.
Bresser-Pereira, L.C. 1996. Da administração burocrática à gerencial. Revista do Serviço
Público, 47(1), 7–40.
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). 2013. The World Factbook, Available at https://www.
Cia. Gov/Library/Publications/The-World-Factbook/ (retrieved 4 August 2013).
Claus, L. 2005. Montesquieu’s mistakes and the true meaning of separation. Oxford Journal
of Legal Studies, 25, 419–51.
Fung, A. 2006. Varieties of participation in complex governance. Public Administration
Review, December, Special Issue, 66–75.
Government of Brazil. 1992. Constituição da Republica Federativa do Brasil: Promulgada em
5 de Outubro de 1988, São Paulo: Saraiva.
Government of Brazil. 2011. Sinopse do Censo Demográfico de 2010. In: Estatística,
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística Brasília.
Government of Brazil. 2013a. Ibge Cidade@ [Online]. Brasília: Ibge. Available at http://
www.Ibge.Gov.Br/Cidadesat/Index.Php?Lang5_En (accessed 6 August 2013).
Government of Brazil. 2013b. Resultado Fiscal do Tesouro Federal. Secretaria do Tesouro
Nacional. Ministério da Fazenda.
Hood, C. 1995. The ‘New Public Management’ in the 1980s: variations on a theme.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2/3), 93–109.
Hood, C. and M.W. Jackson. 1991. Administrative Argument. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT:
Dartmouth Pub. Co.
Lustosa Da Costa, Frederico. 2008. Brasil: 200 anos de estado; 200 anos de administração
pública; 200 anos de reformas. Revista de Administração Pública, 42(5), 829–74.

March, R.M. 1961. Formal organization and promotion in a pre-industrial society. American
Sociology Review, 26(4), 547–56.
Merton, R.K. 1949. Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory
and Research. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Moraes, A.D. 2013. Direito Constitucional, São Paulo: Editora Atlas.
OECD. 2010. Human Resource Management, Country Profiles: Brazil, available at http://
www.Oecd.Org/Gov/Pem/Oecd%20hrm%20profile%20-%20brazil.Pdf (retrieved 4 August
2013).
Pietro, M.S.Z.D. 2013. Direito Administrativo, São Paulo: Editora Atlas.
Pogrebinschi, T. 2010. Conferênciais nacionais, participação social, e processo legis-
lativo. In Serie Pensando o Direito, No. 27, available at http://Participacao.Mj.Gov.
Br/Pensandoodireito/Wp-Content/Uploads/2012/12/27pensando_Direito.Pdf (accessed 4
August 2013).
Resende, F.C. 2002. Por que reformas administrativas falham? Revista Brasileira de Ciências
Sociais, 17(50), 123–42.
Rhodes, R.A.W. 1997. Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity,
and Accountability. Buckingham and Philadephia, PA: Open University Press.
Secchi, L. 2006. Agenda building in Brazilian municipalities: when and how citizens partici-
pate. In Jochen Franzke (ed.), Making Civil Societies Work, Potsdam: Potsdam University
Press.
Secchi, L. 2008. Public management reforms at the municipal level: multi-case study in
Barcelona, Boston and Turin. PhD Thesis, Graduate School in Social, Economic and
Political Sciences, University of Milan.
Tomio, F.R.D.L. 2002. A criação de municípios após a Constituição de 1988. Revista
Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 17, 61–89.
Vaz, J.C. 2002. Desafios para a incorporação da transparência em um modelo de gestão
municipal. In P. Spink, S. Caccia-Bava and V. Paulics (eds), Novos Contornos da Gestão
Local: Conceitos em Construção, São Paulo: Pólis/Fgv-Eaesp.
Whitaker, G.P. 1980. Coproduction: citizen participation in service delivery. Public
Administration Review, 40(3), 240–46.

11. Public administration in Latin America:
adaptation to a new democratic reality
Guillermo M. Cejudo
INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, Latin America has experienced drastic changes in its

political landscape: countries in the region have moved from authoritarian
rule to democracy, and in the process have transformed their public sector
to respond to this new reality. However, each country has responded
differently to these processes: whereas some countries have gained insti-
tutional capacity and administrative sophistication, others remain unre-
sponsive and ineffectual. This chapter offers an analysis of these changes
and an explanation for the different trajectories. In doing so, it addresses
contemporary debates on trajectories of public sector reform, on admin-
istrative capacity building in developing countries and on the sources of
change and continuity in the public sector.
THE EFFECTS OF DEMOCRACY ON THE

BUREAUCRACY
For decades, it was widely assumed that the reason behind the poor
performance of Latin American governments was the absence of demo-
cratic elections that could create incentives for politicians to improve
their bureaucracies and to refrain from corrupt practices. The argument
was that the quality of government could not be improved as long as
authoritarian regimes remained in power because it was in the interest of
non-democratic political elites to have a government that functioned on
the basis of clientelism (in order to obtain support) and corruption (in
order to obtain rents). Yet, at the same time, several scholars have shown
that democratic elites do not find it easy to promote reforms aimed at
improving the performance of public bureaucracies because either they
did not want to lose the patronage opportunities or because any reform
would face considerable resistance and could endanger their survival as
elected leaders or the stability of the new democratic regime (Grindle,
1977; Arellano Gault and Guerrero, 2003; Geddes, 1994; Ames, 1990;
247

Oszlak, 1986). Yet change has occurred. Of course, each country has
experienced a different trajectory of reform, and with different results:
whereas some countries have gained institutional capacity and adminis-
trative sophistication, others remain unresponsive and ineffectual. Some
nations have experienced greater decentralization towards subnational
units, but others have reverted to their initial decentralizing attempts.
Finally, some countries have reduced the role of the public sector in
the economy, while others have increased dramatically its weight and
influence.
In contrast with previous democratic episodes, some “third- wave”
democracies in Latin America – those that emerged after the 1970s – have
been relatively more successful in transforming their governments by cre-
ating more professional bureaucracies, promoting freedom of informa-
tion initiatives, strengthening external audit agencies, and transforming
organizational structures and practices through administrative reforms
(Grindle, 2001; Heredia and Schneider, 2003; Longo, 2005; Zuvanic
and Iacoviello, 2005; Marcel and Toha, 1998; Barzelay et al., 2003).
However, not all democracies have been equally successful in this area;
some unlikely candidates have carried out significant reforms whereas
other strong democracies have been unable to do so. This new situation
of bureaucratic reform within democratic regimes poses a new question:
why – despite the tradition of democratic regimes unable to transform
their bureaucracies – have some democratic countries, but not others,
been able to do so?
The argument of this chapter is that the activation of constraints on the
executive, and particularly the interest and capacity of Congress to impose
restrictions on the discretionary authority of presidents over the bureau-
cracy, facilitates administrative reforms that tend to improve the quality
of governments. This combination of interest and capacity explains both
variation over time (why third-wave democracies have been able to reform
their public bureaucracies, but previous democratic regimes have not) and
across countries (why some democratic governments have done it, but
others have not). If the executive is subject to oversight by other institu-
tional actors and by restrictions imposed by a legislature, if it has to follow
certain procedures to appoint and dismiss bureaucrats, and if it is required
to apply rules in the daily operation of government, then the quality of
government will improve.
These restrictions are rarely self-imposed. As many students of new
democracies have found out, new democratic leaders prefer to be free
from these constraints in order to be able to appoint people at will, to
obtain illegal rents and to implement clientelistic policies. This is the poli-
tician’s dilemma studied in Geddes’s (1994) famous book: if democratic

Public administration in Latin America 249
oliticians reform their administration, they lose electoral support; if they

p
do not, the regime loses legitimacy:
[A]lthough a democratic political system should ideally provide politicians with

good reasons for supplying public goods desired by citizens whose votes they
need to stay in office, in reality the combination of the information asymmetry
and the influence asymmetry between members of internal and external con-
stituencies gives politicians an incentive to respond to the particular interests of
some politically useful citizens rather than to the general interests of the public
as a whole.
Administrative competence is an especially costly form of collective good to
most politicians because, as detailed above, politicians in unreformed systems
rely on access to state resources to build their support organizations, and
administrative reform threatens such access. Effective reforms establish merit
as the criterion for employment, price competition as the criterion for award-
ing contracts, and impersonal rules for determining who received government
benefits – thus depriving politicians of important resources.
Politicians who might otherwise consider offering reforms as a strategy for
attracting support will not be able to afford the cost in lost political resources as
long as they compete with others able to use such resources in the struggle for
votes. This is the politician’s dilemma. (Ibid.: 41–2)
In the last three decades, Latin American countries have moved from
authoritarian (mainly military) regimes, in which electoral competition
was banned (or at least restricted), to democratic regimes, which (albeit
still imperfect) allow political contestation and protect basic liberties
(Mantilla and Munck, 2013). Following these transitions, and despite the
fact that the new democratic politicians faced the same dilemma as previ-
ous governments, some changes have occurred. Latin American countries
have experienced substantial changes in their public bureaucracies: from
the managerial reform in Chile during the 1990s, to the transformation of
the civil service in Uruguay, the Weberian reforms in Brazil in the 1980s
and the managerial reaction to them in the 1990s, the creation in Mexico
of a career civil service in the federal bureaucracy, and freedom of infor-
mation legislation in several countries in the region. These reform episodes
challenge those accounts that see bureaucratic reforms in new democra-
cies as heroic acts of politicians going against their immediate interests of
reelection or support building, as policy spillovers from economic deci-
sions, or as simple impositions by international organizations.
Indeed, once established, a democracy must face, sooner or later, the
challenge of bringing about change in a bureaucratic apparatus that
was moulded by the needs and preferences of the authoritarian regime
(Cejudo, 2011). This is so because, when trying to implement a gov-
ernment agenda, any regime – authoritarian or democratic – will have
a strong interest in aligning administrative institutions to its political

8.5
7.5
6.5
5.5
5
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
Note: This figure measures Democracy using variable fh_ipolity2 in the Quality of
Government Standard Dataset. The scale ranges from 0 to 10, where 0 is least democratic
and 10 is most democratic. The variable is an average of Freedom House political rights
and civil liberties scores transformed to a scale 0–10 and Polity IV scores transformed
to a scale 0–10. It has imputed values for countries where data on Polity are missing by
regressing Polity on the average Freedom House measure. Countries considered are:
Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama,
Paraguay, Peru, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname,
Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Source: Teorell et al. (2013).
Figure 11.1 Latin America democracy, 1980–2012
project. The process of political change also brings about new demands
from an active electorate and new constraints from institutions created (or
strengthened) to oversee the executive, which, we might expect, reduces
opportunities for corruption, and limits the amount of resources avail-
able for clientelism and patronage. Moreover, elites in post-transition
democracies want to adjust the bureaucratic structure inherited from the
pre-transition regime to reflect their own priorities. As their authoritar-
ian past was left behind, Latin American democratic governments had to
respond with strategies to adapt their public sectors to a new environment
(see Figure 11.1).

THREE EXAMPLES OF ADAPTATION

(AND RESISTANCE) TO THE DEMANDS OF
DEMOCRATIZATION
In this section, I analyse the process of public sector reform in three new
democracies in Latin America that emerged after a long-lasting authori-
tarian episode: Mexico, Chile and Argentina (for the evolution of their
democracy levels, see Figure 11.2). Improvements in the quality of their
public bureaucracy (if any) came not directly from the new democratic
status of the regime but from the activation of constraints in the executive,
particularly legislative constraints.
Mexico
Mexico’s road to democracy was longer than in other Latin American

cases (with political liberalization starting in the 1970s and the first presi-
dential electoral defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
in 2000). A long series of electoral reforms and a gradual increase in the
number of local and state elections won by opposition parties led, in
1997, to the first Congress in modern Mexico not dominated by the PRI.
Subsequently, in 2000, the opposition National Action Party (PAN) won
the presidency (before losing to the PRI in 2012).
In 1997, when the PRI lost the majority in the lower chamber, institu-
tional constraints that were enacted in the Constitution but were dormant
under the PRI regime became active. Congress became involved in public
sector reform and introduced legislation that continuously stripped the
presidency of its almost total autonomy in dealing with the federal bureau-
cracy. Opposition parties in Congress called for reducing the lack of
accountability in the public sector, and discretionary spending in the exec-
utive. This was coupled with the budgetary reform proposed by the previ-
ous government, which gave legislators more instruments for monitoring
government performance. Congress was also the main actor behind one
of the last institutional changes under the PRI regime: the creation of the
Federal Audit Office (Auditoría Superior de la Federación, ASF) in 2000.
A constitutional amendment and a new audit law were passed to create
a relatively autonomous institution (but under the control of the lower
chamber) (Apreza, 2004). This decision not only modified bureaucratic
behaviour (because public officials were now under supervision from an
external body), but also gave Congress a new instrument to control and
oversee the executive, not only in the annual revision of public accounts,
but also when Congress decided to initiate special audits. Later, in 2008,
this Office would be further strengthened.

10
Democracy (FH imputed polity)

2 Mexico
252
Argentina
1
Chile
0
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
Year
Note: This figure measures Democracy using variable fh_ipolity2 in the Quality of Government Standard Dataset. Scale ranges from 0 to 10,
where 0 is least democratic and 10 is most democratic. The variable is an average of Freedom House political rights and civil liberties scores
transformed to a scale 0–10 and Polity IV scores transformed to a scale 0–10. It has imputed values for countries where data on Polity are missing
by regressing Polity on the average Freedom House measure.

Figure 11.2 Changing democracy levels in Mexico, Chile and Argentina, 1980–2012
Given the long process of political liberalization, when Vicente Fox

(2000–2006) came to power after the first democratic presidential transi-
tion in Mexican history, he did not find a bureaucracy that was completely
unfamiliar with the pressures of democratic governance. Even before Fox
took office, the bureaucratic apparatus had already faced the pressure of
an opposition-dominated Congress (Klesner, 2001) and had been open
to some extent to congressional oversight and media scrutiny (Guerrero,
2002). Moreover, the bureaucracy was not as clientelist and disorganized
as it had been years before. Even if not all the reforms of the 1980s and
1990s were successful, some of them had a real impact on the bureaucracy.
It is not surprising that one of Fox’s priorities was to change the public
administration’s long-standing patterns of clientelism and lack of profes-
sionalism, and to introduce modern mechanisms (mainly from private
sector practices, to which he had been exposed as a former businessman)
to reduce inertia and align the bureaucracy with his ambitious agenda,
and to face the high expectations generated during the electoral cam-
paign. Originally, the overall plan of the government was summed up in
a document called Strategic Model for Government Innovation (Oficina de
la Presidencia para la Innovación Gubernamental, 2001), which tried to
foster the introduction of managerial practices into the public sector. Two
years into Fox’s term, the government strategy was further specified in the
Presidential Agenda for Good Government, which put forward six goals: a
government that costs less; a quality-oriented government; a professional
government; a digital government; improved regulation government; and
honest and transparent government (Muñoz, 2004; Pardo, 2007). Officials
in different agencies were assigned responsibility over each of these goals,
and the results were mixed. There was greater use of information technolo-
gies throughout the government, and several managerial initiatives were
implemented (such as citizen charters and prizes for innovation), but most
changes were introduced without any structural modification of the public
administration towards further decentralization, and the promise to
increase managerial autonomy was not fulfilled. So, even if, rhetorically,
there had been some similarities with other cases of managerial reform,
this strategy did not modify the centralized and hierarchical character of
the administration.
All these limited efforts to improve the quality of government after the
transition shared a similar origin: presidential decisions, without congres-
sional involvement. And they also shared similar objectives: strengthening
the executive’s control over the bureaucracy, without reducing its autono-
mous authority. In the same period, other initiatives from Congress
were not only more ambitious but also had greater potential in reducing
corruption and improving the performance of the federal bureaucracy.

The first was a campaign to guarantee access to government informa-

tion. In July 2002, Congress approved a Freedom of Information Law
(Ley Federal de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información), which has been
a useful mechanism for deterring corruption in the federal bureaucracy
and for giving citizens the opportunity to obtain information about gov-
ernmental activities and expenditures. This law has been praised as one
of the most advanced freedom of information laws in the Latin American
region, and its provisions are enforced by an autonomous organism (the
Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información, IFAI). In a brief period of
time, all federal agencies created offices dedicated to processing citizens’
enquiries and web portals where basic budgetary and personnel informa-
tion are posted and updated regularly; and the agencies have also modi-
fied rules and procedures to guarantee access to government information
(López Ayllón et al., 2010). In 2014, a constitutional amendment trans-
formed IFAI into an autonomous body with jurisdiction over Mexico’s
three levels of government.
A second important change in the public administration has been the
creation of a career civil service system. The Civil Service Law, passed
with no opposition in Congress in 2003, charged the newly created
Ministry for Public Administration with the responsibility of regulating
and implementing the career system. Secondary regulation was issued in
March 2004 (and replaced in 2007), and recruitment has started to take
place through competitive examinations (severely questioned by some
experts). The long-term impact of the law is yet to be seen, and some of its
provisions have been short-circuited by “temporary” appointments under
both Fox and his successor Felipe Calderón (2006–12) (Méndez, 2010).
The Ministry of Finance is resisting loss of power over personal payment
decisions, and in some ministries there have been obstacles to the effective
operation of the committees in charge of the implementation of the career
system (Arellano Gault and Klingner, 2004; Pardo, 2004; Martínez Puón,
2011). Similarly, there have been some questions about the quality of the
recruitment process. However, the system is already operating in several
parts of the government (Merino, 2006).
Congress has also promoted two additional initiatives aimed at improv-
ing the performance of the federal bureaucracy. In 2003 it passed a bill on
social development (Ley General de Desarrollo Social) that set the basis
for creating a policy evaluation regime for all social programs. This law
created a National Council of Evaluation of Social Policy (Coneval) in
charge of coordinating performance and impact evaluations of all social
programs (Maldonado, 2009). Social programs (such as Oportunidades,
a conditional cash- transfer program) are now routinely evaluated by
external agents coordinated by the Council, and there are a dministrative

procedures aimed at making sure that agencies take into account the rec-
ommendations of external evaluators (González, 2010). More recently,
in 2007 and 2008, a series of constitutional amendments reinforced the
emphasis on a results-oriented public administration, a more autonomous
and powerful external audit institution, and greater transparency (López
Ayllón, 2009; Dussauge, 2010).
Not all these initiatives have been wholly successful. In particular,
the civil service law has faced significant resistance from many quarters.
During the Fox administration, ministries complained about the central-
ized design of the system and delayed its implementation. In the Calderón
administration, the civil service was regarded with suspicion by ministers
and political appointees, and they have effectively avoided following the
civil service rules by making repeated use of exception clauses for tempo-
rary appointments (Martínez Puón, 2011; Dussauge, 2011). Transparency,
evaluation and external control also face several challenges: from their
lack of articulation (several institutions, processes and responsibilities are
not articulated into a coherent system) to the lack of effective sanctions
for public officials (pointed to regularly as the source of corruption and
impunity in Mexico) (López Ayllón et al., 2010).
Yet, although not all initiatives were successful, it is clear that Congress
has been a key factor in trying to improve the quality of the public bureau-
cracy. A slow process of democratization and the activation of political
constraints on the executive set in motion new dynamics in the Mexican
bureaucracy, even if not all of them were deliberately aimed at improving
the quality of government (but rather part of political strategies aimed at
constraining the power of the president).
Chile
Chile’s democracy emerged from a long- lasting authoritarian episode

characterized by strong centralization and absence of checks on the
authority of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. None the less, the Chilean
democratic governments made significant improvements in the public
sector in the years following the transition. The Concertación govern-
ments (an alliance of Socialist and Christian Democrats) have created in
the last two decades a more professional and honest bureaucracy, with
reforms that have been emulated by its neighbors, that has contributed to
a success story of economic and social development.
Historically, the Chilean bureaucracy has always been more profes-
sional and competent than the public administration in other Latin
American countries. Yet the legacy of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime
in the area of public administration was double: the government carried

out comprehensive reforms in the structure and size of the bureaucracy,

which resulted in a much smaller public sector (from 45 percent of GDP
in 1973 to 17 percent in 1989), functionally separating policy-making min-
istries and implementation agencies. At the same time, however, the long-
standing attack on the public sector led to a public administration that
was inefficient and demoralized (and underpaid), and lacked resources
and capacity to work effectively (Marcel and Toha, 1998; Garretón and
Cáceres, 2003).
The rapid democratization of the Chilean regime activated institutional
constraints that were either ineffective or non-existent under Pinochet: the
1980 Constitution established a clear separation of powers, and the legisla-
tion inherited from the authoritarian period prescribed rules that shaped
decisions on labor relations, budget allocation and external control of
the bureaucracy. At the same time, when the first Concertación president
Patricio Aylwin took power, he faced numerous constraints imposed by
the previous regime. The new government opted for a strategy of political
and economic stability. This approach was also reflected in the govern-
ment’s position regarding the bureaucracy. The government acknowl-
edged that the public administration lacked the resources and capacity
to operate effectively in the new democratic context. However, a radical
reform was ruled out from the beginning (Ramírez Alujas, 2001).
By 1993, it was clear to policy makers that the bureaucracy was not
performing well and, despite significant increases in the funds allocated
to public programs, the outcomes had not improved accordingly (Marcel,
1999). Consequently, there was change in the reform strategy. Instead of
pursuing comprehensive reforms in the whole government, the Budget
Directorate in the Ministry of Finance, working within the existing
legal restrictions inherited from the Pinochet era, initiated a program of
gradual improvement in the management of public agencies. It undertook
several pilot projects in selected public organizations, based on manage-
rial doctrines of strategic planning and performance evaluation. Each
agency in the pilot program would sign a performance contract with the
president, specifying measurable objectives and deadlines. This approach
was also adopted by the second president of the postauthoritarian
period, Eduardo Frei (1994–2000), who, like Aylwin, was a member of the
Concertación alliance.
It was only in 1997 that the government formulated a more compre-
hensive strategy for reform: the Strategic Plan for Public Management
Modernization. The plan assumed the gradual approach of the previous
years and did not include any attempt to modify the bureaucracy in a sig-
nificant way. Most of the policies were the usual suspects in New Public
Management style reforms (Hood, 1991): red-tape simplification, citizen

charters, prizes for innovation and quality in the public sector, IT-based
procurement systems (ChileCompra), e-government initiatives, and per-
formance evaluation (Waissbluth, 2005). It was, despite its flaws, and with
no congressional involvement, one of the most ambitious programs of
managerial reforms in Latin America (Bresser-Pereira, 2001).
In this process, the role of Congress was very limited. According to the
constitutional design of the Chilean political system – which created a
strong executive – the president enjoyed a monopoly of decision making in
relation to public administration. Regarding the actual capacity of the leg-
islature to oversee the performance of the public administration, Siavelis
(2000: 74) has argued that there is a problem of “disconnected fire alarms
and ineffective policy patrols”, and that the mechanisms “to investigate,
control, and punish corruption and inefficiency are woefully inadequate”.
More importantly, the opposition in Congress showed no interest in
reforming the administration; its interest lay not in reducing the discre-
tionary authority of the president over the bureaucracy, but in defending
the status quo, because it saw the bureaucracy (and other institutions
related to the functioning of government, such as the comptrollership) as
authoritarian legacies to be defended, rather than reformed.
It took a combination of a sense of crisis and congressional involve-
ment to initiate the first attempt to go beyond the gradual approach of
managerial reforms. When the third president of post-authoritarian Chile
took office in 2000, it was expected that new attempts at introducing more
ambitious reforms would be made. Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) was the
first Socialist member of the Center–Left coalition to run for president
and, even though he won by a small margin, the political context had
changed. After two successful administrations, the threat of an authoritar-
ian regression had diminished; and, after Pinochet’s detention in London
in 1998 on charges of human rights abuses and his prosecution in Chilean
courts (before his death in 2006), his influence on national politics was
reduced.
Lagos’s initial approach to public administration reform was to main-
tain the moderate changes introduced by Frei. His program on State
Modernization and Reform (Programa de Reforma y Modernización del
Estado), announced in 2000, was a continuation of Frei’s managerial poli-
cies, with an emphasis on performance assessment, improvement in service
quality and customer orientation.
This approach would change after 2002, when major corruption scan-
dals involving illegal payments to politicians and public officials from the
government’s discretionary “reserved funds” (gastos reservados) (Santiso,
2007) and irregularities in public infrastructure projects (Pliscoff, 2004)
challenged the view that Chile’s public administration was immune to

corruption and that gradual managerial reforms had been enough to

adapt the bureaucracy to the new democratic context. In response to these
scandals, the executive and the opposition parties in Congress signed in
January 2003 a series of agreements to reform the administration.1
It was the first time since the transition that Congress had become
involved in administrative reform (although the pact was brokered by
party leaders before submitting it to legislators). Congress and the execu-
tive agreed to push for several reforms in the structure and functioning of
the bureaucracy, including institutional reorganization (some ministries
were merged), administrative simplification, and changes in procurement
policies, human resources and financial management. Political parties
committed themselves to quickly approve the necessary legal reforms in
Congress, which involved amending several laws dating from the Pinochet
era.
In these agreements, the rightist opposition pushed for a reform of
the appointment process of high-level civil servants that would lower the
number of presidential political appointees and create a new career track
for top officials (Sistema de Alta Dirección Pública) in order to reduce the
politicization of the elite bureaucracy (Aninat et al., 2004). The role of the
opposition was particularly important for changing the reform strategy
because right-wing parties no longer saw the bureaucracy as an enclave
from the past that needed to be protected from new democratic elites.
Given the changing role of the opposition parties (trying to promote a
more future-oriented platform, instead of focusing on the authoritarian
past), it made sense for them to introduce reforms that would impose
constraints on the government’s ability to appoint party loyalists to top
positions in the bureaucracy. Furthermore, these changes were “sup-
ported by opposition parties in part because of an expectation that the new
system would provide them with more opportunities for their partisans in
government” (Grindle, 2010: 18).
But the most important reforms were those aimed at transforming the
traditional career patterns in the bureaucracy, characterized until then by
immovability of public officials and promotions based on tenure rather
than on merit. Congress passed a new civil service law (Ley de Nuevo Trato
Laboral) that eliminated many of the rigidities inherited from the authori-
tarian regime (such as restrictions in inter-agency mobility) and created a
unified legal framework for the civil service. A new personnel management
office was created (Dirección de Servicio Civil), in charge of implementing
the new career civil service, which incorporates merit and performance
as the most important determinants of an official’s career, based on
regular evaluation and training (Longo, 2005; Pliscoff, 2004). The results
of this law were soon evident: “When President Michelle Bachelet took

office in 2006, she was allowed to appoint just 800 officials (out of a total
of 160,000 in the central government administration), a quarter of the
number appointed six years earlier by her predecessor, Ricardo Lagos”
(“Chile: not so shiny”, The Economist, 2008).
Years later, under the presidency of Lagos’s successor Michelle Bachelet
(2006–10), a similar trajectory of reform (in this case regarding a freedom
of information initiative) occurred when, after two high-profile corrup-
tion scandals in September and October of 2008, Congress finally passed
a Transparency Law (Law 20,285 on transparency of the civil service and
access to information on the state administration), which became effective
in 2009. This law established a Consejo para la Transparencia (Council on
Transparency), an autonomous agency with members appointed by the
president with Senate’s consent.
Argentina
The development of Argentina’s public sector mirrors that of its Latin

American neighbors: after a turbulent nineteenth century plagued by elite
conflict and the difficulties of state formation, it experienced a significant
expansion during most of the twentieth century, with strong intervention
in the economy and growing activity in social policies. The bureaucracy,
under both civilian and military governments, failed to develop effective
mechanisms for merit-based recruitment and was prone to corruption and
clientelism.
When, after almost eight years of authoritarian rule, the military junta
dictatorship collapsed amidst military defeat and widespread economic
crisis, Argentine voters chose Raúl Alfonsín (1983–89) of the Unión
Cívica Radical as new president in 1983. The new government faced
enormous political and economic challenges. Regarding the public sector,
Alfonsín encountered two immediate problems: a demoralized and dis-
organized bureaucracy; and a budgetary deficit that severely limited
the available alternatives. The new government set out comprehensive
goals: to control fiscal deficits; to effectively train public officials at all
levels; to make public government information; and to create ex ante
control mechanisms to review legality and rationality in public decisions
(Roulet, 1988). However, in practice, “[T]he Alfonsín administration
designed an administrative reform policy that was gradual and difficult
to be implemented” (Ghio, 1999: 3). Instead of far-reaching reforms that
modified legislation and created new institutions, the government opted
for incremental changes aimed exclusively at an internal reorganization of
the bureaucracy and the training of public officials. At least two reasons
explain why Alfonsín opted for an incremental reform. In the first place,

legislative legacies from the past impeded any drastic change: from the
constitutional provision that granted stability to public employees (that
he chose to respect, in contrast to previous governments), to the already
chaotic labor relations regime, which he did not want to modify in the
first years in order to avoid alienating the already demoralized bureau-
cracy. A second, and powerful, reason was the critical economic situation,
which limited the available resources for any reform and also led him to
ignore calls to dismiss significant numbers of employees, thus avoiding the
impression that government caused further unemployment.
Eventually, all these attempts to reform the bureaucracy were soon
overshadowed by the worsening economic situation. By 1987, it was clear
that the economic strategy was not working: hyperinflation was not con-
trolled and economic growth had not resumed. In the 1988 elections, the
Peronist candidate Carlos Menem won easily. Carlos Menem’s govern-
ment (1989–99) faced the enormous task of dealing with an economic crisis
that seemed out of control. The situation of the public administration,
inherited from the Alfonsín years, was no better. Public employment had
grown considerably; salaries for public officials had decreased considera-
bly; and the career system had been overshadowed by political appointees
and organized in several incoherent regimes.
Menem’s initial response to the dramatic economic situation was
more radical than Alfonsín’s. Soon after taking office, Congress passed
the 23,696 State Reform Act and the 23,697 Economic Emergency Act
(August 1989), which opened the door for the drastic shift in economic
policy that took place under Menem’s presidency. The most important
consequences of these laws were the large-scale privatizations that took
place under Menem, which marked a dramatic shift in the economic role
of the state (by which Argentina would became a poster child of interna-
tional organizations promoting the Washington Consensus).
The government declared a state of emergency in the national public
administration and, as part of the powers that Congress had delegated,
Menem obtained authority to eliminate or reduce state agencies and to
reorganize the public sector in order to deal with the economic crisis. As
Llanos (2002: 84) explains:
The government’s proposal for state reform made it clear that it was the
executive and its cabinet which would be controlling the process of restruc-
turing the public sector, rather than Congress, for the simple reason that the
urgency of the moment did not allow time to discuss each privatization case
individually.
As part of the economic restructuring initiated by those emergency decrees,

the government suspended any new recruitment for public positions, both

in the central administration and in public enterprises. Moreover, execu-

tive decrees 435/90 and 1757/90 reduced the number of top civil officials
(secretarías and subsecretarías), forced the early retirement of civil serv-
ants and the dismissal of all non-permanent staff, and imposed controls
on government purchases and contracting.2 The number of public sector
personnel decreased considerably (although the most significant reduction
occurred because of the decentralization of education and health services
to the provinces). Despite these decisions, the results obtained through
the initial downsizing efforts of the early 1990s were counterbalanced by
increases in organizational structures and personnel in the following years.
By 1995, the number of top posts surpassed that of 1990, before the initial
reductions. Moreover, “[w]hile the number of employees in the Federal
public sector dropped (genuinely) as a result of privatizations and (only
nominally) decentralization, the number of employees in political areas
rose not only in relative but also absolute numbers” (Orlansky, 2000: 2),
mainly in areas such as the Office of the Presidency, the Ministry of
Interior, Ministry of Economy and the Office of the Chief of Staff.
Menem used his political clout to neutralize institutions that – if
effective – could have served as a check on the executive. In 1990, he dis-
missed members of the Tribunal de Cuentas de la Nación and replaced
them by loyal members headed by his brother, and later transformed
the Court into a new National General Audit. Menem had already suc-
cessfully “packed” the Supreme Court, through legislation to deal with
the opposition’s objection to expanding the number of judges from
five to nine, positions that were filled with Menem loyalists (Levitsky,
2000; Helmke, 2004). Similarly, Menem replaced the Fiscal Nacional de
Investigaciones (a supposedly autonomous prosecutor) when he initiated
investigations regarding corruption allegations against the government.
When Menem’s own appointees to the Sindicatura General de Empresas
Públicas and the Inspector General de Justicia criticized the lack of trans-
parency in the privatization process, the president replaced them as well.
In sum, early in his term Menem “short-circuited . . . institutions of hori-
zontal accountability” (Blake and Lunsford, 2007: 14).
By the end of his first term in office, Menem had accomplished impor-
tant changes in the economic role of the Argentine state and had created a
powerful political machine that would serve to gain him re-election and to
maintain a Peronist majority in Congress. His government, however, had
failed in its attempts to reform the federal public administration, which
remained corrupt, demoralized and expensive. This lack of success in
public sector reform, combined with new economic pressures by the begin-
ning of Menem’s second term, led to a renewed effort of reform, called the
Second Reform of the State. The trajectory of this new reform effort was

similar to the first one: delegation of legislative powers to the president and
the initial emphasis on organizational restructuring replaced by a mere
downsizing program.3 By the end of the Menem administration, corrup-
tion remained untamed (Menem and many of his close associates would
be prosecuted after leaving office for numerous corruption allegations);
the civil service was chaotic, and the rule of law an exception. His succes-
sor (from the Unión Cívica Radical), Fernando De la Rúa (1999–2001),
tried, again, to introduce some reforms. The rhetoric was similar: the goals
of this new process of reform would be to achieve fiscal balance, to fulfill
the promise of a professional career civil service, and to eradicate corrup-
tion. The new government created an Anticorruption Office (replacing the
Office for Public Ethics), charged with investigating allegations against the
previous government and preventing bad practices in the new one.
The government also announced an initiative to introduce more flex-
ibility in the public sector, with a managerial strategy following the
Chilean experience (Plan de Modernización del Estado, 2001). However,
in practice, as in all preceding and subsequent administrations, De la
Rúa’s government wanted to exercise direct control over the bureaucracy,
and existing regulations were an obstacle to that purpose. For even his
limited efforts came to a halt when a new economic crisis hit Argentina
in 2001. Successive governments – from the short-lived ones after De la
Rúa’s fall to the long-lasting presidency of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner –
had to deal with the economic crisis or were relieved by the commodities
boom and had little time for administrative concerns. Congress has failed
in its attempt to impose controls or to enact legislation (e.g. Freedom of
Information) to limit the executive discretionary power over the bureau-
cracy. Thus, more than two decades after transition to democracy, the
Argentine public sector remained plagued by patrimonialism, corruption
and a lack of professionalization.
PUBLIC SECTOR CHANGE: THE LOGIC OF

CONGRESSIONAL INTERVENTION
The experience in Mexico and Chile shows that administrative reforms are
more likely to succeed when political actors different from the executive
(particularly Congress) promote them to limit the discretionary authority
of the president over the bureaucracy. In the Argentina experience, this
intervention did not take place. Reforms were initiated and promoted by
the executive; Congress had a reactive role (if any) but did not activate any
mechanism of effective oversight or control of the president’s discretion-
ary authority over the bureaucracy.

Like other countries with a relatively stable democracy (e.g. Uruguay, or,
to a lesser extent, Colombia), Chile has managed to reform its bureaucracy,
introducing changes to the civil service system and making it more account-
able and responsive to politicians’ priorities. In Mexico, as in Brazil and
Peru, initial changes seem to point in the same direction; however, there
were limited improvements in corruption control and the professionaliza-
tion of the bureaucracy has not been completed. Argentina failed in several
attempts, and three decades after its most recent democratization, its
bureaucracy is still plagued by corruption scandals, an extremely politicized
civil service, and a lack of effective controls, just like most countries in the
region. The trajectories followed by the political elite in the post-transition
period have differed widely among these three countries and reflect broader
trends in Latin American countries (Ruhl, 2011; Bohn, 2012; Grindle,
2012; Longo, 2008; Ramió and Salvador, 2008; Panizza and Philip, 2005).
These cases allow us to detail the type of decisions that these countries have
made when trying to improve the quality of their bureaucratic apparatuses.
There are some decisions that point at important institutional constraints,
such as civil service legislation aimed at reducing the power of presidents to
appoint and dismiss bureaucrats at will, increasing transparency and access
to information laws, and strengthening external audit institutions.
These are the types of restrictions imposed by Congress that, while
constraining the discretionary authority of presidents, lead to improved
quality of government. It is a case of “enabling constraints”: restrictions
that, by tying the hands of specific politicians, increase the quality of the
bureaucracy under their control. Civil service reform, which in many new
democracies means creation of a professional career civil service, places
merit on personal loyalty or political patronage as the main criteria for
decisions about recruitment and promotion. Transparency and access
to government information legislation limit the discretionary power of
bureaucrats and give citizens access to information; this component has,
at least, two effects on governments. First, it improves their archival prac-
tices, and makes them more interested in showing effectiveness; second,
because it increases the risk of exposure and, thus, respect for laws and
regulations, this legislation is a strong check on corruption. The capac-
ity and independence of external audit institutions, finally, is related to
improved performance standards and less corruption, because it means
that there is effective external oversight and that corrupt or unlawful
practices are more likely to be detected and punished. These enabling con-
straints limit the discretionary authority of a politician, but they improve
the capacity of government as a whole. They reinforce the idea of bureau-
cracy as the executor of democratic decisions, rather than of the spoils
system often commanded by some politician’s discretion.

OTHER INCENTIVES AND DETERRENTS TO

CHANGE
Democracy has not been the only reason behind the changes in Latin
America’s public administrations. Just as democratization was taking
place, many countries in the region also went through processes of politi-
cal, fiscal or administrative decentralization that have realigned the rela-
tionship between national and subnational actors and have modified the
instruments available for national public officials to carry out policies
(Díaz Cayeros, 2006; Falleti, 2010; Gibson, 2004; Cabrero and Zabaleta,
2009). In recent years, however, some countries (Ecuador, Venezuela)
have shifted back towards centralization (Eaton, 2013). But decentraliza-
tion has not lived up to the expectations it raised in the 1990s, when it was
presented as a solution to an overgrown state, with little capacity to iden-
tify local needs. On the contrary, as Eaton (2012: 646) argues, “decentrali-
zation has made the State in Latin America more fragmented, incoherent
and internally divided”.
In economic terms, whereas some Latin American governments
have abandoned the idea that development will come from internal
industrialization with a big role for the public sector and, instead,
have embraced the notion that international trade, low government
intervention and free markets will be the foundation for development
(Chong and Zanforlin, 2004; Bunce, 2001; Przeworski, 1991; Hagopian,
2004), others have opted for a reinvigorated role of the state, with a
big, interventionist public sector (Weyland et al., 2010). In any case,
the region’s openness to trade has increased (not only because of the
commodity boom of the past decade, but also because some countries
have increased their exporting capacity in manufacturing), and govern-
ment expenditure in the region has grown significantly, as shown in
Figures 11.3 and 11.4.
CONCLUSION
Latin American public administrations have experienced important trans-

formations, following dramatic changes in the political, economic and
social reality of the region. Their reform trajectories cannot be explained
by simplistic mentions of the Washington Consensus or the New Public
Management. They cannot be assumed to be just reactions to economic
restructuring. And they cannot be dismissed as mere window dressing to
please foreign donors. This chapter has shown that public sector change is
directly linked to the process of democratization, which has transformed

85
80
75
70
65
60
55
50
45
40
1950
1952
1954
1956
1958
1960
1962
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
Note: This figure measures Openness to Trade using variable pwt_openk in the Quality
of Government Standard Dataset, which equals Exports plus Imports divided by real
GDP per capita. Countries considered are: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas,
Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica,
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti,
Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St Kitts and Nevis,
St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and
Venezuela.
Figure 11.3 Openness to trade
the incentives of politicians and has placed new demands on the public
bureaucracies of the region.
Yet these transformations cannot be considered completed or success-
ful. In some cases, democracy has not been enough to push for merito-
cratic recruitment, access to government information or accountability.
Even in those countries where some positive changes have taken place,
a new agenda – again, linked to political processes – is being shaped:
a renewed interest in institutional capacity for effective governance, a
growing concern for corruption and lack of accountability, and a powerful
impetus for building monitoring and evaluation systems across the region.
This will not be the last step in the process of administrative change: politi-
cal transformation and economic demands will continue to shape bureau-
cratic reforms in the region. The public administration in Latin America
is still addressing old problems (from lack of proper meritocratic recruit-
ment in government to accountability institutions that remain ineffective)
while being challenged by new ones (the demands from a more tech-savvy

27
25
23
21
19
17
15
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
Note: This figure measures Government expenditure as a percentage of GDP using
variable wdi_ge in the Quality of Government Standard Dataset. Expense is cash payments
for operating activities of the government in providing goods and services. It includes
compensation of employees (such as wages and salaries), interest and subsidies, grants,
social benefits, and other expenses such as rent and dividends. Countries considered are:
Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama,
Paraguay, Peru, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname,
Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Figure 11.4 Government expenditure as percentage of GDP in Latin

America
citizenry, less toleration to corruption, widespread mistrust of govern-

ment, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis). Administrative reform-
ers have to cope with these challenges within the democratic institutional
setting, which makes reforms less likely to achieve quick results, but more
likely to be effective in the long run.
NOTES
1. Acuerdos político-legislativos para la modernización del Estado, la transparencia y la pro-

moción del crecimiento.

2. These decrees also suspended the Work Collective Agreements and established that they
were to be renegotiated on the basis of these new priorities of fiscal restraint.
3. In 1995, after his re-election, he created the Office for Public Ethics, “an executive branch
vehicle for gathering personal financial statements that might identify conflicts of inter-
est and illicit enrichment” (Blake and Lunsford, 2007: 14). Again, this was an executive
decision; legislative controls remained weak.
REFERENCES
Ames, Barry (1990), Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America
(California Series on Social Choice and Political Economy). Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: University of California Press.
Aninat, Cristobal, John Londregan, Patricio Navia and Joaquín Vial (2004), Political
Institutions, Policymaking Processes, and Policy Outcomes in Chile. Mimeo: Research
Department, Inter-American Development Bank.
Apreza Reyes, Martha (2004), “La Auditoría Superior de la Federación: una mirada
desde los Órganos Constitucionales Autónomos”. In Cuarto Certamen Nacional sobre
Fiscalización Superior y Rendición de Cuentas. Mexico City: Auditoría Superior de la
Federación.
Arellano Gault, David and Juan Pablo Guerrero (2003), “Stalled administrative reforms
of the Mexican State”. In Blanca Heredia and Ben Ross Schneider (eds), Reinventing
Leviathan. The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries. Miami, FL:
North–South Center Press.
Arellano Gault, David and Donald E. Klingner (2006), “Mexico’s professional career service
law: governance, political culture and public administrative reform”. International Public
Management Review, 7 (1): 20–41.
Barzelay, Michael, Francisco Gaetani, Juan Carlos Cortázar Velarde and Guillermo Cejudo
(2003), “Research on public management policy change in the Latin America region:
a conceptual framework and methodological guide”. International Public Management
Review, 7 (1): 20–41.
Blake, Charles H. and Sara Lunsford (2007), “Contemporary corruption in Argentina:
the dawn of a new era or business as usual?” Paper presented at Congress of the Latin
American Studies Association, Montréal, Canada.
Bohn, Simone R. (2012), “Corruption in Latin America: understanding the perception–
exposure gap”. Journal of Politics in Latin America, 4 (3): 67–95.
Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (2001), “New public management reform: now in the Latin
America agenda, and yet . . . ”. Revista Internacional de Estudos Políticos, 9: 117–40.
Bunce, Valerie (2001), “Democratization and economic reform”. Annual Review of Political
Science, 4: 43–65.
Cabrero, Enrique and Dionisio Zabaleta (2009), “¿Cómo construir una mística interguber-
namental en la política social? Análisis de cuatro experiencias latinoamericanas”. Revista
CLAD (Centro Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo), 43 (1): 1–22.
Cejudo, Guillermo M. (2011), Constraining the Executive: How Democracy Improves the
Quality of Government. Boston, MA: UMI.
Chong, Alberto and Luisa Zanforlin (2004), “Inward-looking policies, institutions, auto-
crats, and economic growth in Latin America: an empirical exploration”. Public Choice,
121 (3): 335–61.
Díaz Cayeros, Alberto (2006), Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin
America. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Dussauge, Mauricio (2010), “Combate a la corrupción y rendición de cuentas: avances,
límites, pendientes y retrocesos”. In José Luis Méndez (ed.), Políticas Públicas. Mexico
City: El Colegio de México, pp. 207–52.
Dussauge, Mauricio (2011), “The challenges of implementing merit-based personnel policies

in Latin America: Mexico’s civil service reform experience”. Journal of Comparative Policy
Analysis, 13 (1): 51–73.
Eaton, Kent (2012), “The state of the State in Latin America: challenges, challengers,
responses and deficits”. Revista de Ciencia Política, 32 (3): 643–57.
Eaton, Kent (2013), “Recentralization and the left turn in Latin America: diverging
outcomes in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela”. Comparative Political Studies, 20 (10):
1–28.
The Economist (2008), “Chile: not so shiny. How an excess of political stability can get
in the way of good government”. 17 May, p. 48, http://www.economist.com/node/113
76951?story_id511376951.
Falleti, Tulia G. (2010), Decentralization and Subnational Politics in Latin America.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Garretón, Manuel A. and Gonzálo Cáceres (2003), “From the disarticulation of the state to
the modernization of public management in Chile: administrative reform without a state
project”. In Blanca Heredia and Ben Ross Schneider (eds), Reinventing Leviathan. The
Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries. Boulder, CO: North–South
Center Press, pp. 113–49.
Geddes, Barbara (1994), Politician’s Dilemma. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ghio, Jose M. (1999), “The politics of administrative reform in Argentina”. Paper prepared
for the Conference of the Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing and Transition
Countries. Washington, DC, 15 July.
Gibson, Edward L. (2004), “Federalism and democracy: theoretical connections and cau-
tionary insights”. In Edward L. Gibson (ed.), Federalism and Democracy in Latin America.
Boston, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1–28.
González, Javier (2010), “La evaluación de la actividad gubernamental: premisas básicas y
algunas anotaciones sobre la experiencia mexicana”. In José Luis Méndez (ed.), Políticas
Públicas. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, pp. 143–75.
Grindle, Merilee S. (1977), “Patrons and clients in the bureaucracy: career networks in
Mexico”. Latin American Research Review, 12 (1): 37–66.
Grindle, Merilee S. (2001), “Despite the odds: the political economy of social sector reform
in Latin America”. Faculty Research Working Paper Series, John F. Kennedy School of
Government.
Grindle, Merilee S. (2010), “Constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing career civil
service systems in Latin America”. Harvard University, HKS Faculty Research Working
Paper Series, RWP10-025.
Grindle, Merilee S. (2012), Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the Politics of Public Sector
Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Guerrero, Eduardo (2002). “La reinvención del gobierno en la transición democrática:
rendición de cuentas en la administración pública de México”. Paper presented at
the VII International Congress on State Reform and Public Administration, Centro
Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo, Lisbon, 8–11 October.
Hagopian, Frances (2004), “Authoritarian legacies and market reforms in Latin America”.
In Katherine Hite and Paola Cesarini (eds), Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin
America and Southern Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 85–158.
Helmke, Gretchen (2004), Courts under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in
Argentina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heredia, Blanca and Ben Ross Schneider (eds) (2003), Reinventing Leviathan. The Politics of
Administrative Reform in Developing Countries. Miami, FL: North–South Center Press.
Hood, Christopher (1991), “A public management for all seasons”. Public Administration,
69 (1): 3–19.
Klesner, Joseph L. (2001), “Divided government in Mexico’s presidentialist regime: the 1997–
2000 experience”. In Robert Elgie (ed.), Divided Government in Comparative Perspective.
Levitsky, Steven (2000), “The normalization of Argentine politics”. The Journal of
Democracy, 11 (2): 57–69.

Llanos, Mariana (2002), Privatization and Democracy in Argentina. An Analysis of President–

Congress Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Longo, Francisco (2005), “Diagnóstico institucional comparado de sistemas de servicio
civil: informe final de síntesis”. Paper presented at the V Reunión del Diálogo de Gestión
y Transparencia de la Política Pública’, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo – Inter-
American Development Bank, Washington, DC, 17–18 March.
Longo, Francisco (2008), “Quality of governance: impartiality is not enough”. Governance,
21 (2): 191–6.
López Ayllón, Sergio, Mauricio Merino and Guillermo Cejudo (2010), “La estructura de la
rendición de cuentas en México”. México: CIDE – Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas.
López Ayllón, Sergio (2009), “El acceso a la información como un derecho fundamental:
la reforma al artículo 6º de la constitución mexicana”. Mexico City: Instituto Federal de
Acceso a la Información Pública.
Maldonado, Claudia (2009), “La evaluación de programas sociales en México. Reflexiones
sobre un sistema emergente”. Buen gobierno, 7: 23–34.
Mantilla Baca, Sebastián and Gerardo L. Munck (2013), “La calidad de la democracia: per-
spectivas desde América Latina”. Quito: CELAEP Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios
Políticos: Fundación Hanns Seidel.
Marcel, Mario (1999), “Effectiveness of the state and development lessons from the Chilean
experience”. In Guillermo Perry and Danny Leipziger (eds), Chile: Recent Policy Lessons
and Emerging Challenges. Washington, DC: World Bank, pp. 265–325.
Marcel, Mario and Carolina Toha (1998), “Reforma del estado y de la gestión pública”. In
René Cortazar and Joaquín Vidal (eds), Construyendo Opciones: Propuestas Económicas y
Sociales para el Cambio de Siglo. Santiago: Dolmen, pp. 575–633.
Martínez Purón, Rafael (2011), “Directivos versus políticos. La importancia de la función
directiva en las administraciones públicas”. Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa.
Méndez, José L. (2010), “El servicio profesional de carrera en la administración pública
federal”. In José Luis Méndez (ed.), Políticas Públicas. Mexico City: El Colegio de México,
pp. 179–206.
Merino, Mauricio (ed.) (2006), Los desafíos del servicio profesional de carrera en México.
Mexico City: CIDE – Secretaría de la Función Pública.
Muñoz, Ramón (2004), “Experiencia mexicana en la construcción de un servicio profesional
de carrera”. Paper presented at the IX International Congress on State Reform and
Public Administration, Centro Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo,
Madrid.
Orlansky, Dora (2000), “Silent innovations in federal civil service. Argentina 1989–1999”.
Paper presented at IPSA XVII World Congress, Quebec City.
Oszlak, Óscar (1986), “Public policies and political regimes in Latin America”. International
Social Science Journal, 38: 219–36.
Panizza, Francisco and George Philip (2005), “Second generation reform in Latin America:
reforming the public sector in Uruguay and Mexico”. Journal of Latin American Studies,
37: 667–91.
Pardo, María del Carmen (2004), “Propuesta del gobierno Fox para reformar la adminis-
tración pública”. Paper read at IX Congreso Internacional del CLAD sobre la Reforma
del Estado y de la Administración Pública, Madrid.
Pardo, María del Carmen (2007), “La gerencialización de la administración pública”. Foro
Internacional, 190 (4): 895–925.
Pliscoff, Cristian (2004), “Public management reform in Chile 1990–2003: advances and
drawbacks”. Santiago, Unpublished paper.
Przeworski, Adam (1991), Democracy and the Market Political and Economic Reforms in
Eastern Europe and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramió, Carlos and Miquel Salvador (2008), “Civil service reform in Latin America: external
referents versus own capacities”. Bulletin of Latin America Research, 27: 554–73.
Ramírez Alujas, Álvaro (2001), “Modernización de la gestión pública. El caso chileno
(1994–2000)”. Santiago: Universidad de Chile.

Roulet, Jorge E. (1988), El estado necesario. Buenos Aires: Fundación Jorge Esteban Roulet,
Centro de Participación Política.
Ruhl, Mark (2011), “Political corruption in Central America: assessment and explanation”.
Latin American Politics and Society, 53 (1): 33–58.
Santiso, Carlos (2007), “Eyes-wide shut? The politics of autonomous audit agencies in
emerging economies”. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id5982663.
Siavelis, Peter M. (2000), The President and Congress in Postauthoritarian Chile. Institutional
Constraints to Democratic Consolidation. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Teorell, Jan, Nicholas Charron, Stefan Dahlberg, Sören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein, Petrus
Sundin and Richard Svensson (2013), The Quality of Government Dataset, version
20Dec13. University of Gothenburg: The Quality of Government Institute, http://www.
qog.pol.gu.se.
Waissbluth, Mario (2005), “La reforma del estado en Chile 1990–2005. Diagnóstico y pro-
puestas de futuro”. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, Working Paper Serie Gestión No. 76.
Weyland, Kurt, Raúl L. Madrid and Wendy Hunter (eds) (2010), Leftist Governments in
Latin America: Successes and Shortcomings. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zuvanic, Laura and Mercedes Iacoviello (2005), “Informe de situación del servicio civil en
Chile”. In Koldo Echebarría (ed.), Informe sobre la Situación del Servicio Civil en América
Latina. Washington, DC: BID.

12. Administrative developments in India
Krishna K. Tummala
INTRODUCTION
Fully cognizant of the greater possibility of errors of omission rather

than commission and possible sweeping generalizations, this chapter
attempts to provide a brief narrative about Indian administration within
the context of an ‘ecological study’ as advocated by Fred W. Riggs (1961
and 1964), himself inspired by John M. Gaus (1947). Riggs further pro-
posed that it is not enough to study the environment of administration,
but must also dwell on the ‘context’. The Waldovian (Waldo, 1948) tra-
dition that public administration is political philosophy is also followed
here. Administrators do not act in a vacuum but within a given political/
ideological setting. Given that, this chapter starts by providing the Indian
setting, then dwells on the political and administrative arrangements,
and concentrates on three relevant aspects: ‘reservations’, administrative
behaviour and the more insidious and ubiquitous corruption.
THE SETTING
India, by any criterion, is large, diverse and complex, often challenging

generalizations and defying easy emulation. It accounts for more than 17
per cent of the world population but covers only 2.4 per cent of the earth’s
surface. Spanning nearly 3 287 263 square kilometres of territory divided
into 28 different states and union territories,1 it has a population of 1.2
billion people with a growth rate of 17.6 per cent during the last decadal
census (2000–2011). There is an uneven sex ratio of 940 females for every
1000 males. There is a predominant urban–rural divide with nearly two-
thirds living in rural areas (Government of India, 2013). Among them,
Indians speak 22 constitutionally recognized languages, besides English
(not to mention myriad dialects, some of which do not even have written
scripts).2 It is noteworthy that India does not have a national but only an
official language, Hindi. However, when the Centre (the commonly used
expression to denote the federal government) communicates with any
state, the Hindi communication is accompanied by a translation into the
language of the state concerned. It is also a multi-religious society with a
271

predominant Hindu population (over 82 per cent), with nearly 13 per cent
Muslims (the third-largest congregation in the world).
India can also claim other distinctions. It is a nuclear power (without
being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty), and very much part
of the space age, having launched a probe to Mars in November 2013. Its
economy is the fourth largest in the world, and the third largest in Asia
(next to China and Japan), but with a per capita annual income of only
$1527.00 (The Hindu, 2012). Yet 71 in 100 Indians have a cellphone. It is
a power house of information technology (IT). More importantly, being
the largest working democracy in the world, it is often held up as a beacon
of democratic developing society. Its political institutions are well estab-
lished, and work, even if intermittently. It regularly holds elections, which
are more or less fair and with not much violence. Unlike its neighbours
Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is also politically stable.
Given its diversity, India has a federal form of government. Paul
Appleby (1957: 54) commended it as ‘extremely federal’, inasmuch as the
Centre has to depend largely on the state governments for the admin-
istration of developmental projects. Yet it is called a ‘union of states’.
Considering the several fissiparous tendencies at the time of independence,
the constitution-makers wanted to make sure that the country would not
be balkanized. To that effect they provided some extraordinary features
that enables it to be turned into a near unitary form. Three provisions are
most important here. First, under Article 3, the Parliament can redraw
the boundaries of states by merging some together, or dividing an exist-
ing one. Second, and most controversial, are the ‘Emergency Powers’, in
particular Article 356, which permits the president to dismiss any duly
elected government of a state and suspend its legislature, on the advice of
the governor of the state, who is appointed by the Centre, and take over
its administration (Tummala, 1996: 373–84). The third, most importantly
for this chapter, are the All-India Services, where the top administrators
are moved between the Centre and states. Given these mixed features,
Alexandrowicz (1957) described the Constitution of India as sui generis.
India also preferred to retain a parliamentary from of government, the
foundations of which were laid during the British regime. It has a president
at the national level, a ceremonial head similar to the British monarch,
except that the president is elected by a rather complex electoral process.
With a multi-party system, after regular elections the majority party is
invited to form a government headed by the prime minister, who in turn
picks his/her cabinet, governed by the principle of collective responsibility.
Similar arrangements are made at the level of each of the states, headed
by a governor, appointed by the Centre, and an elected chief minister. At
the beginning, the Congress Party headed a majority government at the

Administrative developments in India 273
Centre and most of the states as well (except the state of Kerala, which has
the distinction of having the world’s first duly elected communist govern-
ment). But since the late 1960s, with the rise of regional parties, the norm
has been to have coalition governments at the Centre, at times formed
by as many as 19 political parties coming together to form a majority.
Coalition governments tend to have two consequences. One is their short
term in office, with one lasting no more than 13 days, when one or more
of the coalition partners pull out by withdrawing support for various
political or ideological reasons. And the other is a consequent policy
paralysis, with the several coalition partners pulling in different directions,
pushing their own regional, partisan and even personal political agendas
(Tummala, 2009: 323–48).
PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS
Indian politicians subscribed to socialism with its own indigenous charac-

ter. It is called ‘Indian socialism’, not ‘socialism in India’ (Tummala, 1994:
chs II and III). The Congress Party itself in its confabulations always added
qualifying adjectives. The first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru,
impressed as he was with developments in Russia since its Revolution,
did not subscribe to the violence involved. Largely influenced by Fabian
but not Marxian socialist thinking, he sought an evolutionary, but not
revolutionary, socialism. This was of course the credo, as advocated by
Mahatma Gandhi, who himself studied several Western writers such as
Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin. In fact, Gandhi translated John Ruskin’s
Unto the Last into Sarvodaya (‘Upliftment of all’). Independent India’s
Constitution also made no mention of socialism initially when it empha-
sized in its preamble only a ‘Sovereign Democratic Republic’. As a con-
sequence of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s militancy, the expression was
changed by adding in 1976 the new language of the 42nd Amendment,
which read ‘Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic’.
Following the above credo, India launched its five-year plans, and
sought to capture the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. Almost all
private enterprise was restricted, and had to be licensed. Almost all major
industries came under state control. Very few imports were permitted in
an attempt to help develop and protect indigenous business and industrial
establishments. There was also a great proliferation of state- initiated
and fully controlled industrial and commercial establishments known as
‘public enterprises’. Consequently, the economy experienced what was
derogatorily known as ‘Hindu growth’ at about 2–3 per cent annually.
These developments conferred a great deal of power on the bureaucracy,

whose permission in the form of licences was needed to start even the
smallest enterprise:
Four different reasons were given for this debacle: the constraints imposed
on the manufacturing sector; domestication of the financial sector to suit
the whims of the states; poor trade policy; and an obsolete tax system. All
this led to what John Kenneth Galbraith described as ‘post office socialism’.
(Tummala, 2001: 52)
This situation was also stated as one of the main reasons for corruption
(Tummala, 2002: 43–63). Time was thus ripe to change direction, which in
a sense was inaugurated by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with the launch-
ing of a technological revolution, in particular in the dissemination of
information technology.
The 1990s had seen a sea change. Because of the dire balance of pay-
ments, a major financial crisis occurred, forcing the government to
guarantee first 20 tons of gold to raise $200 million, and then another
40 tons to raise $600 million more. The rupee was devalued and left to
float. The ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) of 1990 was launched during
the prime ministership of P.V. Narasimha Rao, under the tutelage of the
then finance minister, and the later prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
Following the new public management (NPM) precepts stemming from
the belief that the private sector is more efficient and hence the public
sector should emulate it, several steps were taken to free the economy
from the shackles of government. Markets were liberalized. Now, the
private sector, not the state, would act as the center of focus for economic
development. Several structural changes were duly made, giving more or
less a free hand to the private sector in the development of the nation, and
providing it with several contracts. This in itself invested a different kind
of power in the hands of the state and in the hands of the administrators
– power to award contracts, leading to further corruption as an outcome
of the market economy and globalization, as argued by writers such as
Rotberg (2009). Thus the current regime may be characterized as ‘con-
tract raj’, replacing the former ‘licence raj’. A new consumer society, in
place of the old largely hoarding one, has been unleashed. Accumulation
of wealth, which of course was built into the Hindu system of life (among
its four stages, acquiring artha – wealth, is the second), became the new
watchword. It should also be noted that, among the plethora of gods/
goddesses, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, occupies a predominant place
in Hindu worship. It is claimed that India has now over 103 billionaires,
sixth largest in the world (Indiatoday, 2013). However, as Jean Dreze
and Amartya Sen (2013: viii–ix) point out, the narrative of ‘the growth
process is biased’:

Over this period of growth, while some people, particularly among the privi-
leged classes, have done very well, many more continue to lead unnecessarily
deprived and precarious lives. It is not that their living conditions have not
improved at all, but the pace of improvement has been very slow for the bulk of
the people, and for some there has been remarkably little change. (Ibid.)
Urban areas are becoming enriched. An exodus from the impoverished

rural areas is occurring, resulting in the neglect of agriculture, which still
accounts for a large percentage of national wealth. Unable to meet their
debt burden, several thousand farmers annually commit suicide.
ADMINISTRATIVE ARRANGEMENTS
Pre-independent India did indeed have a well-organized and effective

administrative apparatus, which Prime Minister Lloyd George called the
‘steel frame of India’. The mainstay of this system was the Indian Civil
Service (ICS), which was neither Indian, nor civil, much less of service to
India. Generally ill suited to development administration as we under-
stand it now, it served the colonial masters well in terms of collection of
revenues and maintenance of law and order. It also left an administrative
culture which can be still observed.
When India became independent, a debate ensued as to what to do with
an administrative apparatus that was identified as a tool of the colonial
master. The hard choice was either to abolish this abomination altogether
and start afresh, or create something entirely new that would fulfil the
new nation’s aspirations. Given the absence of a new model, and the lack
of time to even experiment, inherited services were retained by the Indian
Independent Act, 1947. But in an effort to ‘nativize’ them according to the
new ethos, Home Minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel observed:
I need hardly emphasize that an efficient, disciplined and contented service is

a sine qua non of sound administration under a democratic regime even more
than under an authoritarian rule. The service must be above party and we
should ensure that political considerations either in its recruitment or in its
discipline and control are reduced to the minimum, if not eliminated altogether
. . . In an All-India Service, it is obvious, recruitment, discipline and control
etc., have to be tackled on a basis of uniformity and under the direction of the
Central Government which is the recruiting agency. (Quoted in Shiva Rao,
1966: 332–3)
Accordingly, two All-India Services – the Indian Administrative Service

(IAS), and the Indian Police Service (IPS) – were created with the provi-
sion that other new services might be created by the Parliament of India.

Patel and the new services faced major initial challenges. The first was
to cope with the largest transmigration of people between the two inde-
pendent countries of Pakistan and India consequent to the partition of
the subcontinent. As many as 10 to 12 million people crossed the borders,
although many a Muslim chose to stay back in secular India instead of
moving to the Islamic state of Pakistan. The second was to integrate
several independent states into the Indian union. As the British left, as
many as 565 native rulers, who enjoyed their own rule within India (except
for minor, but important, controls by the British), were left behind, pock-
marking the length and breadth of India. These needed to be integrated
as part of the new nation. And Patel, who was known as the ‘steelman’,
succeeded, except in two cases: Kashmir and Hyderabad. While the latter
was integrated by the use of force, the former opted to join the union only
when threatened externally, and continues to be a source of irritation
even today with a part of the territory still a bone of contention between
Pakistan and India.
The third challenge stemmed from the new economic doctrine of demo-
cratic socialism, as already explained. The Government of India, in pursu-
ing planned development, began following five-year plans (the latest being
the 13th). This came in as a major test for the prevailing administrative
apparatus. Created for, and adept at, securing law and order and collect-
ing revenues, it now had to serve a government that decided to control the
‘commanding heights’ of the national economy, and herald a new equal
and just society.
Formidable as the challenges appeared, the Indian administrators
rose to the occasion. Tributes were paid by no less a person than Paul H.
Appleby. In his report of 1953, commissioned by the Government of
India, he said: ‘I have come gradually to a general judgment that now
would rate the government of India among the dozen or so most advanced
governments of the world’ (Appleby, 1957: 8). The compliment was well
deserved. We now turn to examine the Civil Service in India in detail.
The effort to nativize and shape the administration to suit the needs of
the altered state saw several reform attempts. Reports in this regard are
so numerous that even to provide a succinct list would take several pages.
Yet the attempts were disappointing, as seen by no less than the Chairman
of Administrative Reforms Commission II, K. Hanumanthaiah (1970: 1),
who said:
Several studies and inquiries were made of the administrative problems during
the last 15 years after independence. These attempts were, however, limited
in scope, sporadic and uncoordinated. The effort was largely diffused and its
pace uneven. There was no comprehensive and coordinated examination of the
whole administrative machinery.

At least such was the case until 1966.

The Government of India in 1966 announced the appointment of the
Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), modelled after the Hoover
Commission in the USA. There were also suggestions that some of the rec-
ommendations, particularly those related to the civil service, were in fact
inspired by the 1968 Fulton Commission report in the United Kingdom, a
suggestion denied by both the chairman and secretary of the ARC. In any
case, the output of ARC was monumental. In four years’ time it presented
20 reports making some 680 recommendations (based on the work of 33
study teams and working groups). Despite all the laborious work by the
ARC, it should be noted that the administrative structure itself remained
more or less intact.
The Government of India, however, had to deal with the new reality
of the 1990 NEP, as the purpose of the state changed once again. This
required another serious look at the capacity and expertise of admin-
istration. The result was the appointment of a second ARC in 2005. It
produced 18 reports (Singh, 2013: 135–53). A Group of Ministers (GoM)
was constituted to consider the recommendations and review their pace
of implementation. But nothing substantive has come of this to date,
as the government seemed to be more preoccupied with fighting to stay
in office, with the numerous pressures coming from its several coalition
partners. Also to be noted is the resistance of what is known as the ‘IAS
establishment’, as the incumbents object to any radical changes affecting
their services. There now follows a detailed examination of the civil service
in India.
THE CIVIL SERVICE IN INDIA
While each state has its own cadre of civil servants, the Centre has what
is known as Central Services (over 20, in all), divided into Groups A, B,
C and D. Then there is the unique cadre known as the All-India Services,
which serves both the Centre and the states. Article 312 of the Constitution
provides for the All-India Services, two of which are recognized: the
Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the Indian Police Service (IPS). A
very small group from among the former may opt to belong to the Indian
Foreign Service, IFS. The same article also permits the creation of more
All-India Services on the recommendation of a two-thirds majority of the
Rajya Sabha (the Council of States, the upper chamber of Parliament).
In 1955, the Sates Reorganization Commission (SRC) recommended the
creation of several more. But as the states resented the creation of more
of these services (arguing that the federal structure would be adversely

affected), only the Indian Forest Service was added in 1966. For some time
there has been a debate on creating a judicial service, but nothing has so
far come of this. There is not scope in this chapter to go into details about
all these services; only the All-India Services are dealt with here, given
their importance.
As emphasized by the Estimates Committee of Parliament:
In a vast country like India, with different religions, languages and customs,
All-
India Services play a vital role. They provide administrative stability,
national solidarity, and continuity in administration. They also act as invis-
ible catalytic agents in strengthening national integration. With their broader
outlook, these services also provide a bulwark against the forces of disruption,
parochialism and regionalism. (Katyal, 1980: 4)
There is further justification, thus:
●
As on 1 January 2010, with an authorized strength of 5,689 of which 4,534
were filled, the IAS is the elite corps, at the top of all administration.
●
As direct recruits from all over India, and promotees from the State
cadres, they occupy the highest administrative positions at policymak-
ing level while heading the various administrative apparatus of various
Ministries and Departments.
●
As District Collectors, they head the administration at the sub-State
level. They also chair the Committees of Zilla Parishads (elected bodies
at that local district administration level).
●
At times they are posted to head public enterprises and other statutory
bodies. Of late, some are appointed to head Universities.
●
Along with the IPS (who serve as heads of police, among other posi-
tions), they serve a crucial role in the successful functioning of all
national development and integration activities.
●
As elite and permanent employees, they are indispensable in not only
advising the transient, elected Ministers in policymaking, but also crucial
in administering all developmental projects.
●
They set the tone for the entire administration in the country. There in
fact is an all pervasive influence of the IAS culture, which at times termed
as ‘the IAS lobby’ (not necessarily as a compliment), but reflective of
their strength and importance.
●
Most every Indian child is goaded by the parents to aspire for the IAS,
although of late the private sector jobs are more attractive and preferred
for fat pay and not subject to the continuous pin-pricks inflicted by the
elected Ministers and other politicians. But none comes closer to the IAS
for p
restige and elan. (Tummala, 1994: 157)
Established by Article 315, the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC)

serves as a staff agency. Its powers are elaborated in Article 320. It is in
charge of recruitment and selection of personnel to both the All-India

Services and a whole host of non-technical Central Services to fill the

annual need as requested by various ministries and departments. There
are other staff selection commissions in each of the ministries control-
ling the lower-level and other technical services personnel. Article 316
similarly empowers the governor of each state to appoint a State Public
Service Commission. It must be noted, however, that only the state legis-
latures and the union parliament are empowered (Article 309) to regulate
recruitment and other service conditions of civil servants; the respective
governments (i.e. the executive) cannot amend or supersede the legislative
decisions. At the state level the entire civil service cadre is headed by a chief
secretary, who is invariably an IAS officer, just as most other administra-
tive heads of ministries are. At the Centre, the cabinet secretary is the most
senior IAS officer. All ministries and departments are also headed by IAS
officers.
Members of the UPSC (varying in numbers from time to time) are
appointed by the president of India. To uphold the UPSC’s integrity and
protect its independence, each member is appointed for a six-year term, or
until the age of 65 years (whichever comes first). While the members are
eligible for appointment as chair (during their term of office), the chair
and the members are not eligible for appointment for any other office of
the government once they leave the UPSC. The president of India alone
can remove the chair or any member when adjudged insolvent, or engages
in any outside paid employment during the term of office, or is in the
opinion of the president unfit to continue in office by reason of infirmity
of mind or body (Article 317). Removal for misbehaviour by the president
may occur only after an inquiry by the Supreme Court.
Despite a few lapses (leakage of examination questions, or entertaining
undeserved candidates with false birth certificates), the UPSC is known
for its integrity to the extent that one of its former secretaries, P.C. Hota
(2010: 189–201) observed that ‘even the worst critics of the higher civil
services would concede that the competitive examination and interview
based selection process for the AIS (All-India Services) is fair and merit
based’.
Initially, age limits were set for taking these examinations. A candidate
must be 21 years and not more than 24 years. The number of attempts to
take the examinations was restricted to two. Given the largely generalist
nature of the Civil Service, and also as candidates would be coming from
different academic backgrounds, two guidelines are set: first, catch the can-
didates while they are young and still in learning mode, so that they can all
be trained further; and, second, a candidate taking the examinations more
than twice might get used to the examination process, and the result might
not necessarily reflect academic accomplishments. Over time this view had

changed. At the time of writing (2013), candidates taking the examinations

must have a university degree, and must be aged at least 21 years but not
exceeding 30 years. Given their inability to compete with the general cate-
gory of candidates, due to their uneven education and also the policy com-
mitment to improve their lot, the upper age limit for Scheduled Castes/
Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) candidates is set at 35 years, and for the Other
Backward Classes (OBCs) 33. (The current Narendra Modi government is
reviewing the age limits with a view to bringing them down.) Within the
given age limits, general category candidates may take the examinations
four times, while the OBCs are allowed seven, with no limits for the SC/ST
candidates. However, once selected, those failing to get placed in that year
may have to start all over again, as the roster of selected candidates relates
to the year in question.
The examinations conducted for the higher civil service (IAS) consist
of three parts. Given that numerous applicants keep opting to take the
examinations, with an enthusiasm that surpasses their credentials, Part I
is designed to eliminate the not-so-serious candidates. As an aptitude test
in a multiple-choice mode, it consists of two papers of 200 marks each
in general studies. Those who pass this phase take Part II, written essay
tests: one general essay; two papers on general studies; and two optional
subjects (from among the long list of subjects normally taught in any uni-
versity). Each candidate is also tested in two languages of choice (picked
from among the 22 mentioned above). A candidate who does not pass
these two will not progress any further, as no other tests are evaluated.
Part III consists of the ‘personality’ test, which takes the form of an oral
examination (viva voce). Candidates are selected based on cumulative
scores.
Coming as they do from varied educational backgrounds, all those
selected will be further trained together for a short time and individu-
ally according to service: the IAS at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy,
Mussoorie, and the IPS in the Police Academy, Hyderabad. As the train-
ing processes are elaborate, they are omitted here. Instead, three different
areas affecting the service are further dealt with briefly: ‘reservations’,
administrative behaviour and corruption.
‘Reservations’
‘Reservations’ connotes preferential provisions for admission into public

service designed for those deemed to be socially backward because of
eons of social discrimination resulting in economic deprivation as well.
This subject is extensively dealt with elsewhere (Tummala, 1994: ch. IX;
2015), and only a panoramic picture is given here. Intent on preventing

the scourge of the caste system (if not abolish it altogether), the Indian
Constitution talks only about ‘classes’.
However, tension was apparent right from the beginning of the Republic
between preferential policies and constitutional dictates. The Constitution
provides equality before the law, non- discrimination on the basis of
religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equal opportunity for all
(Articles 14, 15 and 16 respectively). Yet the government set preferential
quotas for the three classes. Such set-asides were immediately challenged
in the famous case of Champakam Doairajan v. State of Madras (1951) as
violating the equality principle of the Constitution. The Supreme Court
agreed with the complainant. Committed as they were to equality on one
hand and the uplift of the backward on the other, the government found
itself on the horns of a dilemma that was resolved by adding the very
first amendment to the Constitution by inserting Clause (4) to Article 15,
allowing special preferences to the socially and educationally b ackward
classes, notwithstanding the equality principles.
Such preference was originally designed to cover initial appointments,
but later extended to promotions as well, consequent to the 1962 General
Manager decision of the Supreme Court (by adding Clause 4 [a] to Article
15). Accordingly, among annually available public service slots, 15 per cent
would go to SCs and 7.5 per cent to STs. Initially preference for OBCs was
left for the states to decide. But the Centre also joined them in 1990 by fol-
lowing a decade-old recommendation made by the Mandal Commission,
and setting a 27 per cent reservation quota for them. Keeping in view that
Article 335 of the Constitution stipulated that efficiency in administration
be ensured, the Supreme Court in its 1963 Balaji judgment restricted the
overall preference to no more than 50 per cent of the total. This decision
also maintained that caste could only be one criterion among others while
defining eligibility for preference.
Several troublesome issues have emerged in the implementation of these
preferential provisions. The first and foremost is the result of ‘competitive
populism’, whereby successive governments expanded the gamut of reser-
vations to include more and more castes (note, not classes), particularly
in the OBC category, when the various political parties and governments
try to get electoral advantage by promising, and in fact including, more
and more caste groups. Second, contrary to the academic arguments that
seeking preference denigrates the applicant (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1967:
150; Steele, 1990: 33, 118), several castes, even those traditionally consid-
ered forward, keep demanding inclusion as backward. Third, although
preferential provisions are only ‘enabling’, they tended to be seen as ‘enti-
tlements’. Fourth, in an apparent effort to have the political will prevail
over constitutional principles, whenever the Supreme Court (following the

constitutional provisions meant for equality) put its foot down, the gov-
ernment of the day resorted to constitutional amendments to neutralize
the Court’s objections, such as the 77th in 1995 (to include promotions),
the 81st in 2000 (to carry forward places not filled in one year due to the
paucity of qualified candidates), the 82nd in 2000 (to relax standards to
fill the quota), the 89th in 1999 (to protect seniority), the 93rd in 2006 (to
include institutions of learning, both public and private) and so on. Fifth,
sadly, and worst of all, most of the preferences tended to be based on caste,
despite the fact that the Constitution talks of ‘classes’, as already seen. It
must be noted in this context that, while caste does not determine class,
class does mitigate caste distinctions. And finally, the consequent rancor
of the so-called forward castes that their own opportunities are being cir-
cumscribed by expanding the number of castes for purposes of reservation
continues unabated, just as the demands for inclusion by several castes
increases.
Into this miasma of confusion, some uniting principles are provided by
the Supreme Court (at least, so it was thought!) in 2007, while upholding
the 93rd Amendment: (a) making reservations in state-maintained and
state-aided educational institutions does not violate the ‘basic structure’
of the Constitution, but the issue of ‘private unaided’ schools is left open
to be decided in appropriate cases; (b) identifying ‘backward classes’ on
the basis of caste is valid; (c) while prescribing no time limit (for prefer-
ence) is valid, a periodical review every five years can be made to see the
effectiveness of ‘reservations’; (d) the 27 per cent reservations announced
for OBCs is valid; (e) Article 15 (5), dealing with unaided institutions, does
not contradict Article 15 (4) dealing with aided institutions, as the former
has language, ‘whether aided or unaided’; and (f) the exclusion of minority
educational institutions from the purview of these reservations does not
violate Article 15 (4).
Other observations by the Court in this context are also worth noting. If
reservations are perpetuated, the entire object of ensuring equality will be
defeated, and as it is only an enabling provision, it has to be time-bound.
At some point of time, reservations have to be terminated. ‘[P]eriodic
examination of a backward class could lead to its exclusion if it ceases
to be socially backward or if it is adequately represented in the services.
Once backward, always backward is not acceptable.’ The Court further
observed:
There is no deletion from the list of other backward classes. It goes on
increasing . . . [I]s it that backwardness has increased instead of decreasing? If
the answer is yes, as contended by the respondents (Center and other pro-quota
parties), then one is bound to raise eyebrows as to the effectiveness of providing
reservations or quotas.

Justices Arijit Pasayat and C.K. Thakker added:
The inequalities are to be removed. Yet the fact that there has been no exclu-
sion raises a doubt about the real concern to remove inequality . . . If after
nearly six decades the objectives have not been achieved, necessarily the need
for its continuance warrants deliberations . . . It is to be noted that some of the
provisions were intended to be replaced after a decade but have continued. It
directly shows that backwardness appears to have purportedly increased, and
not diminished.
This is the subject of continued debate. Besides all these controversies, it

should be noted that in a multi-religious society, preference is accorded
only within the context of the Hindu and Sikh religions. And women
are not considered in this regard (although some proportion of seats in
the local governing bodies are set aside for them). For the first time the
Bombay High Court ordered a disabled quota of 3 per cent IAS, both for
initial appointment and promotions in December 2013. Prime Minister
V.P. Singh, who in 1990 implemented the Mandal Commission report in
fulfillment of his electoral promise extending preference to the OBCs, was
reported to have said that he could rest at peace. The country, however,
does not seem to be at peace with this policy of preference.
Administrative Behaviour
The proper relationship between the government (the political masters)

and civil servants has always been a point of contention and debate. The
departure from the timeworn policy–administration dichotomy and the
recognition that civil servants not only administer but in fact do partici-
pate in the policy-making process by virtue of their expertise and also their
proximity to the political decision makers (who tended to be largely less
than experts, even less educated) make for some interesting relationships.
Those few administrators who stick to rules of procedure have come to
regret their professionalism. Others who became fellow travellers by being
part of the political, business and criminal nexus, prospered, resulting in
some of the worst corruption cases. Either way, the morale of the admin-
istrators is shattered. Not only a policy paralysis but also administrative
failure can be observed. The following phenomena are illustrative.
First is the harassment meted out to the higher administrators, either to
shield the criminal activities of the political masters, or as a sort of punish-
ment for not complying with their often illegal demands. It has long been
known that the political masters – the ministers who head the cabinet
departments – try to face down strong-willed civil servants by the simple
expedient of frequent transfers under the pretext that it is not punishment

but only a matter of administrative imperative and/or convenience. The

most recent case in this regard is that of one Ashok Khemka, who held
the position of director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records,
and inspector general of Registration for a period of only 80 days in
the state of Haryana. During that time he unearthed a case in which
Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of the president of the ruling Congress
Party, Sonia Gandhi, was supposed to have made huge sums of money in
land scams by doing nothing more than lending his name to a real-estate
outfit – DLF. Khemka was not only transferred quickly but also investi-
gated. To add insult to injury, he was charge-sheeted by the government
of Haryana, claiming that he insulted Vadra, and sought an explanation
in December 2013. This upright civil servant has the dubious distinction of
having been transferred nearly 44 times in his 32-year career, so far. The
other was that of Durga Shakti Nagpal, who met the same fate on an alle-
gation that she nearly created communal tensions by demolishing a wall
around a mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). The reason behind
her suspension was alleged to be the tough stance she took against illegal
miners who lend support to the government. She was not only transferred
quickly, but in fact suspended, only to be reinstated later after a demon-
stration in her support. In all, UP is (in)famous for transferring 800 IAS
officers during 2012–13!
It is not simply the incumbent administrators but also retired officials
who are harassed in an effort to shield political bosses from their past
criminal activities. P.C. Parakh, former secretary of the Coal Ministry
(retired December 2005), known as the whistleblower in the coal alloca-
tion scam, was himself booked, alleged to have conspired in the same deal.
In his turn, he famously responded that the prime minister, Manmohan
Singh, who was then in charge of coal, must also be booked if there was
a conspiracy as he, as secretary, was after all acting under the minister’s
orders. Parakh was known for his integrity, and it was he who recom-
mended open competitive bidding for coal blocks to make allotment
transparent. Also, he was willing to testify before the Public Accounts
Committee (PAC) of parliament, which was investigating the coal scam,
but was not invited as a witness. Investigation by the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) is continuing.
Second is the flip side of the coin, where civil servants learned the lesson
of cooperating with political bosses, thus not only earning peace, but also
amassing huge sums as part of the ill-gotten gains. Any number of cases
can be provided in which higher civil servants are either the co-accused
in political corruption cases, or on charges of disproportionate assets.
The mining scandals in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh provide good
examples.

Third, several civil servants also found out that it is in their best
interests to be in the good books of the government so that on retire-
ment they find some remunerative and prestigious positions outside the
civil service establishment. For example, Nitish Kumar, former direc-
tor of the CBI (which was often criticized as being a handmaiden of the
government – see below), got an appointment as governor of a state. The
same government felt no compunction in appointing the Secretary of
Defense, S.K. Sharma, immediately after his retirement as Comptroller
and Auditor General, despite the several defense expenditure irregularities
that are being investigated.
The NEP led to the creation of several regulatory commissions. Most
of these are now headed by former higher-level bureaucrats after their
retirement. It is reported that, of the 12 economic regulators, nine are
retired bureaucrats, and in 20 of the 28 states the chief information com-
missioner is the state’s former chief secretary. When the retired com-
merce secretary, Dipak Ghosh, was appointed chair of the Competition
Commission created in 2003, the appointment was challenged; it was
argued that a bureaucrat cannot be appointed to a quasi-judicial position
(as the Commission is to supervise competitive practices). The then Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of India, V.N. Khare, was quoted as saying
indignantly: ‘At this rate, a day would come, maybe after 20 years, when
the 26 judges of the apex court would be replaced by bureaucrats’ (Sriram,
2013: 28).
Fourth, very unprofessional conduct is observed among some senior
officials trying to indulge in politics. Worse, they were formerly in charge
of agencies endowed with the power of force – the army and the police. The
former is the behaviour of the retired chief of the army, General V.K. Singh.
For example, he went all the way to the Supreme Court seeking a change
of his date of birth, which would have given him an additional ten months
in office and certainly changed the line of succession. When criticized for
this unseemly behaviour, he claimed that he was fighting for his honour!
He lost his case and had to apologize to the Supreme Court for remarks he
made against it. He is now a minister in Modi’s Cabinet!
The latter involves the director general of police (DGP) in the state of
Andhra Pradesh, V. Dinseh Reddy, who was reported to have expected
continuation of office after retirement. The chief minister of the state did
not oblige. In turn, the DGP came out with wild charges that his boss
(the CM) actually fomented the law-and-order crisis in the state which is
burning (as of this writing) after the decision to divide it. During the last
year, the Election Commission thrice suggested to the government some
cooling-off period for bureaucrats to join politics/political parties after
retirement. The Government of India, however, has not acceded so far.

To alleviate some of the harassment, and protect the higher civil serv-
ants for acting on oral orders (and not written), 83 retired bureaucrats
(including a former cabinet secretary, a former ambassador, former
chief election commissioner) approached the Supreme Court on a Public
Interest Litigation (PIL). They sought a Writ from the Court to order
an end to oral orders by the political masters, who tended to feign inno-
cence when caught, as there is no written evidence. On 13 October 2013,
the Court gave its verdict in T.S.R. Subramanian, suggesting (at para 17,
6.20 iii) that ‘the civil servants are not having stability of tenure, particu-
larly in the Sate Governments where transfers and posting are made fre-
quently, at the whims and fancies of the executive head for political and
other considerations and not in public interest’. Thus it recommended a
minimum tenure (para 30) by observing: ‘Fixed minimum tenure would
not only enable the civil servants to achieve their professional targets, but
also help them to function as effective instruments of public policy . . .
Minimum assured service tenure ensures efficient service delivery and also
increased efficiency’. To fix responsibility and ensure accountability (para
33), they said:
[W]e are of the view that the civil servants cannot function on the basis of verbal
or oral instructions, orders, suggestions, proposals, etc. and they must also
be protected against wrongful and arbitrary pressures exerted by the admin-
istrative superiors, political executive, business and other vested interests . . .
[T]here must be some records to demonstrate how the civil servant has acted, if
the decision is not his, but if he is doing on the oral directions, instructions, he
should record such directions in the file.
If implemented, this should go a long way to alleviating some of the

anxiety of the higher civil servants. But past experience with a decade-old
similar order regarding the police establishment is not reassuring.
Corruption
Of the 177 countries surveyed by Transparency International (TI) in

2013, India was ranked 94th (TI, 2013). This is not without reason
(Tummala, 2013: 167–87). Reports of massive corruption are daily news.
But to provide a few samples, to start with: (a) in 2012, of the 543 Indian
Parliament members, 158 were found to have pending criminal charges,
some even with murder; (b) the Commonwealth Games, which were origi-
nally estimated by the Indian Olympic Association in 2003 to cost about
$300 million, eventually cost an estimated $11 billion. As much as $1 to $1.7
billion was lost because of alleged malfeasance of the chief of the games,
Suresh Kalmadi, who is also a Rajya Sabha member of the g overning

Congress Party, and its one-time general secretary. He is on bail; (c) the
Adarsh Housing Scheme in Bombay, where apartments built for heroes of
the Kargil war (with Pakistan) and army widows were allotted at cut-rate
prices to several politicians, including some high-ranking army officers and
the then chief minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan (who was forced to
resign); (d) the black market, or underground economy, is estimated to be
worth nearly $640 billion – about half the annual Indian GDP of $1.3 tril-
lion; (e) land scams involving forceful eviction of poor farmers by paying
a pittance of compensation, in the name of ‘development’ and creation of
Special Economic Zones (SEZs), by governments such as West Bengal and
UP, led to alleged personal fortunes made by influential political person-
alities; (f) the 2G spectrum case in 2010, and another commonly known as
‘coalgate’ came out in 2012. Allocation of coal blocks to companies arbi-
trarily and without verifying their credentials during 2004–11 alone is said
to have led to a loss of nearly $210 billion to the exchequer. The list goes
on, with more and worse scandals being unearthed daily.
The obvious questions then are: why such a sea of corruption, and
why cannot it be controlled? The simple answer to the first is twofold:
need and greed. Need could be addressed by generous pay and benefit
packages, which of course is a function of the economy, available human
resource skills and competition for the same personnel between the public
and private sectors. But, even in the presence of generous emoluments,
there is neither a guarantee nor evidence from other countries that corrup-
tion could be eradicated. Certainly, the temptation to take a bribe is far
greater for a person whose pay is below subsistence level. Greed, a matter
of character, is in itself a product of tradition and societal norms. This
is where the importance of laws and institutions to fight greed comes in,
and the political will of the government of the day to go after the accused,
regardless of party affiliation and/or social stature.
The fight against corruption is the domain of two major institutions:
the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI). The CVC was created in 1964. The Supreme Court
of India in the Vineet Narain judgment (18 December 1997) was highly
critical of its working, and asked the Government of India to come up
with legislation to strengthen it. Consequently an ordinance was issued,
and the CVC got a statutory base further to an Act of Parliament in 2003
(Tummala, 2002: 43–69).
Created in 1963, the CBI is a police force investigating both serious
crimes and corruption. As an organization, it is an administrative night-
mare, serving multiple masters. The Ministry of Home Affairs has to
clear the cadre of the commissioners. For funds, it depends on the
Ministry of Personnel, Training and Public Grievances, and reports to it

on day-to-day working. For hiring of all officers above the rank of super-
intendent of policy, the Union Public Service Commission’s approval is
needed. For all corruption cases, it faces the supervision of the CVC. The
Ministry of Law and Justice pays the salaries of prosecutors arguing cases
of corruption for the CBI. Given its poor budget (a total of about $720
million), and authorized strength of 6526 positions, of which 1379 were
vacant for the year 2011–12, the CBI is not expected to be very efficient.
Moreover, it came under severe criticism not only for its inactivity when
high dignitaries are concerned, but also for the fact that it became a politi-
cal pawn in the hands of the government of the day. Given the latter, a
former director general of police of Haryana, who served with the CBI,
raised the not so rhetorical question: ‘Who owns the CBI?’ (Lall, 2011).
The Supreme Court recently observed that the CBI is a ‘caged parrot’
serving many masters, and demanded that the Government of India should
come up with legislation by 10 July 2013 insulating the CBI from political
pressures (Nayyaar and Sriram, 2013: 32–4). No action has been taken as
of this writing. Having found out that the CBI and other police investiga-
tors had not performed their primary duties, the Supreme Court previously
observed in its Vineet Narain decision (cited above), that ‘[i]nertia was the
common rule whenever the alleged offender was a powerful person’.
Punishment following a trial is accorded by the courts. The Indian court
system operates notoriously slowly, with the cumbersome jurisprudence
and case overload. It is estimated that there are about 30 million pending
cases, and at the present rate of disposal it would take about 300 years to
clear such a backlog (i.e. without taking on any new cases). On average,
a court case takes about 15 years to be cleared (Vittal, 2012: 148, 154).
The already-clogged and slow judicial process is made worse since the
inauguration of Public Interest Litigation (PIL), using which anyone can
drag anyone to the court on the flimsiest cause, or no cause at all – just to
be vindictive, or a nuisance, or to settle past scores. T.S. Tulsi, a Supreme
Court lawyer, suggested that hardly 6 per cent of cases lead to conviction
in the Indian courts (quoted in Vittal, 2012: 52).
Courts and judges are generally held in esteem and considered less
corrupt. Nonetheless, there are several former Supreme Court judges and
other justices of the High Courts of States who are being investigated for
misconduct. The most current is an accusation by an intern that a former
judge of the Supreme Court, A.K. Ganguly, indulged in sexual miscon-
duct with her. Immediately following the break of the story in November
2013, the then chief justice convened a three-judge investigative panel that
found out that there is a prima facie case against the judge, but did not
wish to take any action as the judge is retired and the intern was working
in a private capacity. The case, however, is being investigated by the

police. Moreover, the courts are accused of being ‘active’, and one cannot
but notice that they can, by their various decisions, be seen to be entering
the policy-making arena.
Into this bleak picture a little bit of sunshine appeared under the leader-
ship of Anna Hazare, who went on a fast to death demanding the establish-
ment of a Lokpal (an ombudman) at the Centre. The idea itself is not new.
As far back as 1968, the Lok Sabha passed a bill to provide for a Lokpal,
but it did not clear the Rajya Sabha. In response to Hazare’s fast, after a
very convoluted discussion, a rather weak bill was passed in December
2011 by the Lok Sabha, much to the dismay of Hazare and other activists.
The Rajya Sabha did not clear the bill when its session ended on 30 March
2012. Neither was it taken up during the following monsoon session,
which ended in mid-2013. In the winter session a watered-down Lokpal
Act was indeed passed, and Hazare, who had opposed the bill tooth and
nail, finally accepted it. The government promised to introduce seven other
supplemental bills, but passed only the Whistleblower Protection Act.
However, the position of Lokpal had not been filled: the first two who were
offered the position declined, protesting that the government still wanted
to control that office, which was supposed to be independent. Meanwhile
the government lost the 2014 election. No party got enough votes to be
regarded as the Oppposition. Efforts are now (late 2014) under way to
change the law, but the Opposition parties are opposing the legislation.
As Vittal (2012: 5) observed, there was a ‘multiple organ failure’. First,
time and again, it is argued that corruption is a British legacy. But the
British left India over 67 years ago! As already seen, since independence
in 1947, first the ‘permit raj’, and then the ‘contract raj’ facilitated cor-
ruption. Second, criminalization of politics and politicization of criminals
resulted in turning the ‘lawmakers’ into ‘lawbreakers’, as the Election
Commission (EC) observed. Third, there has been one coalition gov-
ernment after another, the last being the United Progressive Alliance
(UPA II) led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the Congress Party.
Coalition governments, which are often dubbed as ‘unholy alliances’, some
lasting as little as 13 days, turned out to be less effective due to all sorts
of pressures and accommodations among the several partners (Tummala,
2009). Coalition partners pursuing separate agendas, and the govern-
ment depending upon their support for its very survival, precluded any
concerted action. Fourth, both the CVC and the CBI failed in performing
their duties. Fifth, the very insistence on rule of law itself seems to have
become an impediment. Article 311 of the Indian Constitution protects
civil servants from mala fide actions of government, and provides security
in the job by stating that no civil servant can be ‘dismissed or disciplined
by an authority subordinate to that which (s)he was appointed’. It is no

secret that a minister would not let his/her employee be indicted easily,
which also means politicization of cases. Sixth, the recent appointment of
P.J. Thomas to head the CVC in 2010, despite charges pending against him
on a Pamolein import scandal while he was the secretary in Kerala, did not
inspire much confidence in the sincerity or seriousness of the government.
Lastly, the one movement that showed some promise also failed, in that
Hazare and his team had shown chinks in their armor. They suffered many
a setback, some self-inflicted. The ‘Team Hazare’ (as the group came to be
known) consisted of several followers with their own personal agendas to
pursue using this movement, thus resulting in the hazards of ‘cooptation’
(Selznick, 1949). Some of these, in fact, found themselves under a cloud.
Kiran Bedi, who was the first female Indian Police Service (IPS) officer
(since retired or forced out, whoever is to be believed), was shown to have
charged first-or business-class fares when she went on lecture tours, but
travelled only in economy. (She explained that she was saving money
for her own NGO.) Another, Arvind Kejriwal, a former tax official, was
himself charged with tax evasion (since paid). He distanced himself from
Hazare eventually, and started a political party, Aam Aadmi, wanting to
fight corruption on his own. The feud between him and Hazare continues.
Hazare himself proved that he is not entirely above politics, as he went
on canvassing in state elections against the Congress Party and Prime
Minister Singh. He was charged as lending support to the opposition BJP/
RSS combination. Thus was lost a momentous occasion, when the masses
seem to have been mobilized and marched in lock-step with Hazare.
The current Lokpal Act is but the latest in the contemplated control
measures; nor will it be the last. It would be a folly to believe that a simple
creation of a Lokpal in itself would be a panacea. It might in fact add
yet another layer of bureaucracy were it not to function properly. For
that matter, it might be noted that there are the Lok Ayuktas (state-level
ombudsmen) with rather patchy records, which do not inspire much
confidence. Could the working of Lokpal be any different?
As already noted, several incumbent Members of Parliament (MPs)
face criminal charges. By some estimated at over 1400, other legislators
nationwide are under the cloud. On 10 July the Supreme Court in its Lily
Thomas (2013) decision invalidated Section 8 (4) of the Representation of
People Act, 1951 (which allowed convicted MPs and members of legisla-
tive assemblies to hold office while an appeal is pending) and stated that all
legislators convicted of crimes shall lose their seats immediately, contrary
to the prevailing practice of holding on to their seats as the slow appeals
process grinds on, seemingly forever. Not only the government but also
all parties panicked. With so many in parliament and government coming
under this category, the Government of India wanted to neutralize the

decision and to restore the status quo ante, and passed an ordinance (as the
parliament was not in session) and sent it to the president for his assent.
The president kept silent. Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty,
vice president of the ruling Congress Party, who is being showcased as
possibly the next prime minister of India, in his youthful exuberance or
indignation barged into a press conference of a different cabinet minister,
convened for an altogether different purpose, and called the ordinance
‘nonsense’, demanding that it be trashed. The prime minister, who was
attending the UN session in New York, was caught by surprise with this
stinging rebuke, and had to withdraw the ordinance.
The courts themselves seem to be flexing their muscles. A case in point is
that of Lalu Prasad Yadav. He was the chief minister of one of the poorest
states – Bihar. Folksy and colorful, he is a proven crook. The case became
public in 1996 in the ‘fodder scam’, when nearly $9.5 billion was siphoned
off from funds meant to buy cattlefeed. Yadav appealed as a case was
filed against him. But in a supreme fit of arrogance, he brazenly installed
his rustic wife as the chief minister, and ran the state by proxy. The good
people took it all in their stride. And then the coalition government of
the United Progressive Alliance (UPA I), led by the Congress Party at
the federal level, needed all the support it could get. Among others, with
a handful of MPs, Yadav came to the rescue. In return, he was made
the minister for Railways for some time. Finally, on 3 October 2013, a
day after the nation celebrated the 144th birth anniversary of Mahatma
Gandhi, the Court handed down a five-year rigorous imprisonment and
about $40 000 fine to Yadav, along with another former chief minister of
Bihar and 44 other accused. Yadav will likely appeal. But, for now, justice
is served, even if it took nearly 17 years.
CONCLUSION
The above analysis shows that, although India’s administration did serve
reasonably well, several reform attempts have not been very successful.
Part of the blame lies with the governments of the day and the resistance
of the ‘IAS lobby’. Now the bureaucracy is under severe stress. Abundant
and ubiquitous corruption and the inability to combat it turn out to be
major disasters for the development of the country. The political atmos-
phere, largely due to the coalition government phenomenon, and lack of
political leaders who rarely, if ever, talk in a national idiom, but prefer
personal, local and regional narratives, corrupt to the core along with the
criminalization of politics, is not helping much. But not all is lost. There
are reasons, though mixed, for optimism.

● Economic liberalization, which undid past state controls, also led

to numerous media outlets, followed by aggressive reportage by
outfits such as Aaj Tak and tehelka.com. But it also saw several
other private and partisan outlets – in both print and television, each
grinding its own personal axe, exposing real or feigned corruption.
Currently, the editor of tehelka, who in his time exposed several
corrupt politicians, is under arrest on sexual assault charges brought
by a colleague.
● The Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005, led to such to an
active, even zealous, media that several journalists have been
killed for relentlessly pursuing unsavory stories of the high and
mighty. The nation itself is yet to come to grips with the funda-
mental issue of protecting the whistleblower. However, it is now
rather difficult for the government to hide behind the Official
Secrets Act of 1923.
● Several NGOs have emerged, such as the Hazare movement. These
civil societies, while raising their own issues of accountability, do
expose some of the rottenness.
● The judiciary, which has been held up as the only bulwark of integ-
rity, but not without its own foibles, has become more active of late
in going so far as to give numerous directions to various govern-
ments, some of which in the normal process have a policy-making
flavor. The slow court system, however, needs to be speeded up.
● The new instrument called Public Interest Litigation (PIL) allows
anyone to approach a court on any issue, thus helping the courts
to step in. Although these suits do serve (or are meant to serve) the
public interest, on occasion they tend to be not only frivolous but
also vindictive (to settle old scores), while also clogging the already
overburdened and slow court system. This needs to be checked. For,
by the time cases come to a court to be judged, the lapse of time
plays havoc as memories fade, evidence is lost or destroyed, and
witnesses are bought and sold.
● Perhaps a more important phenomenon is the progressive disap-
pearance of the mystique and awe of government. The common
citizen who was in the past reluctant, or afraid, to approach a public
servant with a complaint, is of late ready to confront to the point of
ignoring some important traditional taboos. India always showed
respect, almost to the point of deference or even subservience, to
elders and authority figures. Now, it is not uncommon to throw
chappal (common footwear) at them, which tradition considers
disgraceful and disgusting. Yet the government has been brought
down to earth, in a way.

Thus one can see some hope, a hint of optimism, that one day India will
emerge at its best, sooner or later, and preferably sooner.
NOTES
1. The number of states needs some explanation. Although Delhi is listed as a union ter-
ritory, it has its own legislative assembly and government – almost like any other state,
except it is not officially designated as such. Also, in 2013 a decision was made by the
ruling Congress Party to divide the state of Andhra Pradesh into two. Legislation to this
effect was expected to be introduced in the winter 2013 parliamentary session.
2. There were only 18 recognized languages originally, but the 71st Amendment in 1992
added other languages, such as Nepali, making the current total of 22.
REFERENCES
Alexandrowicz, C.H. (1957). Constitutional Developments in India and its Contradictions.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Appleby, Paul (1957). Public Administration in India: Report of a Survey. New Delhi:
Government of India.
Balaji v. State of Mysore, AIR 1963 SC 649.
Champakam Dorairajan v. State of Madras, 1951, SCR 525.
Dreze, Jean and Sen, Amartya (2013). An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gaus, John M. (1947). Reflections on Public Administration. Alabama: Alabama University
Press.
General Manager v. Rangachari, AIR 1962 SC 36.
Government of India (2013). Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation.
Statistical Year Book.
Hanumanthaiah, K. (1970). ‘Foreword to a brief survey’, The ARC and its Work. New Delhi:
Government of India.
The Hindu (15 March 2012, online).
Hota, P.C. (2010). ‘The civil service: past, present and future’, The Indian Journal of Public
Administration LVI (2).
Indiatoday (2013). Online, indiatoday.intoday, 7 November
Katyal, K.K. (1980). ‘Catalytic agents for national integration’, The Hindu International
Edition, 23 August.
Lall, B.R. (2007). Who Owns the CBI? The Naked Truth. New Delhi: Manas.
Lall, B.R. (2011). Free the CBI. New Delhi: Manas.
Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2013). Writ Petition (Civil), No. 449 of 2005.
Nayyaar, Dhiraj and Sriram Jayant (2013). ‘Nowhere to hide’, India Today. 20 May.
Riggs, Fred W. (1961). The Ecology of Public Administration. Bombay: Asia Publishing
House.
Riggs, Fred W. (1964). The Theory of Prismatic Society. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin
Co.
Rotberg. R. (2009). Corruption, Global Security, and World Order. Baltimore, MD: Brookings
Institution Press.
Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne (1967). In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the
Indian State. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Selznick, Philip (1949). TVA and the Grassroots: A Study in the Sociology of Organization.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Shiva Rao, B. (1966). The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents, Vol. I. New
Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration.
Singh, Mahendra Pratap (2013). In Meghna Sabharwal and Evan Berman (eds), Public
Administration in South Asia: India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Boca Raton, FL: CRC
Press.
Sriram, Jayant (2013). ‘Revenge of the Babus’, India Today. 7 October
Steele, Shelby (1990). The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. New
York: St Martin’s Press.
Transparency International (2013). http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013.
T.S.R. Subramanian & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. Writ Petition (Civil), No. 28 of 2011 and
No. 234 of 2011 (2013).
Tummala, Krishna K. (1994). Public Administration in India. Singapore: Times Academic
Press.
Tummala, Krishna K. (1996). ‘The Indian Union and emergency powers’, International
Political Science Review, 17(4).
Tummala, Krishna K. (2001). ‘The Indian administrator in the new millennium’, Asian
Journal of Political Science, 9(1).
Tummala, Krishna K. (2002). ‘Corruption in India: control measures and consequences’,
Asian Journal of Political Science, 10(2).
Tummala, Krishna K. (2009). ‘Coalition politics in India: 2004–2009’, Asian Journal of
Political Science, 17(3).
Tummala, Krishna K. (2013). ‘Can India combat corruption?’, in Jon S.T. Quah (ed.),
Different Paths to Curbing Corruption: Lessons from Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, New
Zealand and Singapore. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishers.
Tummala, Krishna K. (2015) Politics of Preference: India, United States and South Africa.
Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Vineet Narain et al v. Union of India et al, AIR 1998 SC 889.
Vittal, N. (2011). India Today. 10 January.
Vittal, N. (2012). Ending Corruption: How to Clean up India. New Delhi: Penguin Books
India.
Waldo, Dwight (1948). The Administrative State. New York: The Ronald Press.

13. The Tao of governance: public
administration reform in China
Zhichang Zhu
Public administration (PA) in China is under continuous reforms along-

side the country’s recent economic transformation and in coincidence with
the global New Public Management/Good Governance movements. The
interesting questions are: what are being reformed, how do the reforms
proceed, who engage in reforms, what are the outcomes, what would
further reforms look like and what, if any, are the links between the China
experience and global trends? This chapter investigates these questions
in China’s own terms, informed by indigenous rationales and historical
patterns.
LEGACIES AND CONDITIONS
As the birthplace of the modern state (Fukuyama 2011), China has been
a ‘permanently bureaucratic society’ (Balazs 1965). This leaves distinctive
imprints on the country’s modern administration and its reforms, the most
significant of which we present below.
Centralized Authoritarianism
Over the past two millennia, China was governed largely by a single
authority. The first emperor, Shi Huangdi (260–210 bc) of the Qin
Dynasty (221–206 bc), unified the nation, set up a central government,
standardized written language, currency, and length, capacity and weight
measures. Since then, there has been only one unified chaoting (‘court’),
no separated ‘houses’. Centralized ruling was carried on by means of
fa – power-oriented punishment, which was formulated by, among
others, Shen Buhai (420–337 bc), Shang Yang (390–338 bc), Lü Buwei
(290–235 bc) and Han Fei (281–233 bc), and li – virtue-oriented persua-
sion, which was promoted chiefly by Confucius (552–479 bc), Mencius
(372–289 bc), Dong Zhongshu (179–104 bc) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200) (Tan
2011). Foreign invasions and internal rebellions interrupted but did not
destroy the central authority. Instead, they nurtured an enduring desire
295

for it. Deep in the Chinese consciousness, an enlightened and powerful

ruler was a blessing (Wu 2013). There was, and still is, a tendency in the
Chinese to expect the government to deliver order and prosperity (Jacques
2009, pp. 198–9). ‘We should trust and obey the government, for in the
final analysis it serves our interest’, the modern public insists (Nathan
2003, p. 13). The encounters with foreign powers since the Opium Wars
further deepened such a tendency. The Chinese call the painful experience
bainian guochi (100-year national humiliation), out of which emerged a
consensual, single-minded search for fuguo qiangbing (rich state, strong
army) (Bays 1976). After the collapse of the last empire there was a period
of contestation between various political ideas and proposals introduced
from abroad. Yet China quickly settled for a Leninist party state under the
nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, followed by the communist
leader Mao Zedong. Ironically, the neoliberal rhetoric since the fall of the
Berlin Wall only heightens in China the social-Darwinist sense of national
vulnerability. Yousheng liebai (survival of the fittest): in the inescapable
competition between nations, national power is above everything else.
‘Development is the hard truth’, ‘Staying backward is to be beaten’, or
so the Chinese believe. While fully committed to opening up the country
to foreign capital and embracing the market economy, the ‘chief archi-
tect’ Deng Xiaoping set a stark boundary for China’s reforms: national
stability guaranteed by the party state (Wu 2013). In China’s ‘New Long
March’ towards peace and prosperity, the state continues to be looked
to for solutions, not regarded as problems; it is to be strengthened, not
weakened.
Blurred Spheres
The role of the government in China had no boundaries (Grieder 1981;

Shambaugh 2008). From the very beginning, statecraft was defined
broadly as zhiguo – governing the state. In practice this allowed, indeed
demanded, the government to engage in the full complexity of real-
politik, to fulfil both public policy and administration duties (Cheung
2012a, p. 211). The combination of technocratic undertaking and politi-
cal manoeuvre was taken as ‘naturally so’. This is in contrast with the
long Western discourse since the ancient Greeks that evolves slowly from
public ‘management’ (guanli) to ‘administration’ (xingzheng) and only
recently to ‘governance’ (zhili) (Hood 2005, pp. 8–12). The Wilsonian
conception of public administration being a neutral servant untamed
by politics made no sense to the Chinese. Seen as the solution instead of
the problem, the government in China was expected to intervene in all
affairs of people’s life: social, culture, economic as well as political (Faure

Public administration reform in China 297
2006, p. 67). Whereas the state’s function in the economic sphere is, in
the Anglo-American paradigm, confined to the ‘night watchman’ role, in
China the state’s function was, legitimately, to own businesses and control
the economy (Wu 2013; Pye 1988, p. 89). While there was no lack of reform
programmes, from Guan Zi (725–645 bc) to Sang Hongyang (152–80 bc)
and Wang Anshi (AD 1021–86), the debates were firmly focused on how,
never on whether, to do it. Consecutive governments either directly ran,
or authorized selected social groups to run, its rightful interest in strategic
sectors: salt, iron, forests, silk, wine, tea, sugar, cigarettes and so on. In
ancient times, The Book of Song (11th–7th century bc) read: putian zhixa,
mofei wangtu (No land under heaven does not belong to the king); in the
modern era, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) instructed: tianxia weigong (All
under heaven belongs to the public (as opposite to the private)). Hence,
when ruling Mainland China the Guomindang government nationalized
the entire banking sector, controlled 90 per cent of steel and iron output,
and owned absolute majority stakes in key industries, while the subse-
quent Mao regime eliminated the private sector altogether (Wu 2013). As
the polity and the economy deeply interwove into the governance fabric,
‘in China, market and administrative reforms are very much interde-
pendent processes’ (Caulfield 2006, p. 254; Xue and Zhong 2012, p. 285).
When Deng started the post-Mao reform, there was only one massive,
all-encompassing national syndicate, no markets or firms (Lindblom 1977;
Wu 2010). China’s reformers needed to tackle two tasks simultaneously:
state-building and market-building. In this light, the tremendous chal-
lenges and the sea changes brought by China’s reforms make the Reagan–
Thatcher ‘Rolling back the state’ programmes look almost like sideshows.
Meritocratic Bureaucracy
To maintain central control, the emperor Wudi (185–87 bc) of the Han
Dynasty (202–220 bc) sanctioned Confucianism as the state ideology.
Wudi founded an imperial academy for training shidafu (scholar-officials).
The Tang Dynasty (618–907) further institutionalized the national civil-
service examination system, gradually dispensing with nepotic ‘recom-
mendation’ and ‘sponsorship’ practices. Training and examination were
based on Confucian classics that covered history, literary, ethics, political
thought, law and official conduct, but left most minutiae of office duties to
be learned from experience (Kracke 1964, p. 325). Wang Anshi (1021–86),
a chancellor in the Song period (960–1279), when launching large-scale
socioeconomic reforms, systematically consolidated the selection, motiva-
tion and evaluation of state officials (Drechsler 2013). Such a Weberian
bureaucracy of premodern times ensured that the state not only enjoyed

the best possible professional functionaries, but also firmly controlled

the ideas of society, both fundamental to effective governance of the vast
empire. The Tang emperor Taizong (589–649) commented on the civil-
service system, ‘All the heroic and the capable under heaven are now in
my pockets’. This being achieved, ‘the exclusion of the people from gov-
ernment was regarded as a positive virtue’ (Jacques 2009, p. 207). Thanks
to the capable and disciplined bureaucracy, the authority of the state had
no rivals; the ‘Western concern’ of the state, formally sharing power with
the Church, the nobility, the merchant class or civil society, was in the
Chinese eyes intellectually irrational and ethically wrong (Shambaugh
2008). There was, however, a limit to the bureaucracy’s rule. Markedly
different from the European tradition of the ‘divine right of kings’ and the
Japanese belief in an unbroken line of rulers, in China, when an emperor
behaved badly he would lose the Tianming (Mandate of Heaven), and be
replaced, even legitimately killed (Mencius, 2/8; Perry 2001, p. 164; Tan
2011, p. 472). To serve the ‘Son of Heaven’ properly, therefore, scholar-
officials had a moral duty to criticize the ruler’s policies even at the risk of
their own lives. Kracke (1964) comments: ‘The longevity of China’s politi-
cal system must be credited in significant degree to the power and vigilance
of the Censorate’ (p. 321). Competence and virtue are hence the two legs of
China’s imperial bureaucracy.
Inherent Tensions
We focus on two key tensions and begin with intra-state relationships.

China is a continental-size country with a huge population and significant
climatic and geological variety (Naughton 2007, ch. 1). Governing such a
country had to rely on a tall governmental hierarchy. The first emperor
Qin Shi Huangdi’s junxian (prefecture-county) administrative system (see
Greel 1964) survived for over 2000 years because it was fit for purpose.1
Nevertheless, ‘the mountain is high and the emperor is far away’: the
centre’s control weakened as it reached downward to lower levels. This
generated the opportunity for local elites to advance agendas that might or
might not converge with the centre’s interests (Tipton 2007, pp. 114–21).
The trouble was that, without the local elites, China was ungovernable,
to such an extent that the state was ‘comprised of competing levels of
authority’ (Rowe 1983, p. 76). Handling the central–local tensions had
thus been a teething problem for all China’s rulers, not least for those since
the late-imperial era who pursued reformist agendas for the enhancement
of national power (Cohen 1988). Then there was the tension between the
market economy and state monopoly. China was, until the late Qing era
(1644–1912), the most advanced economy in the world, an economy based

on specialized households and workshops, vibrant merchant undertakings

and competitive markets, supported by functioning commercial–financial
institutions (Hamilton 2006; Morck and Yang 2010; Naughton 2007,
ch. 2; Tipton 2007, ch. 4).2 The coexistence of a vibrant market economy
and a powerful state sector was enabled by the Chinese instinct for family
security via wealth generation (Redding and Witt 2007, ch. 4), on one
hand, and the state’s tolerance, however reluctant, towards private busi-
ness in order to heal society (Wu 2013), on the other. The coexistence was,
however, unstable, which laid bare the challenge facing China’s rulers
at all times – governing the relationship between state and society. The
sudden global popularity of the ‘governance’ discourse in the 1990s serves
only to invest the challenge with new urgency (Sigley 2006, p. 496).
Pragmatic Mindscape
Confucianism is a naturalist sociopolitical philosophy. The Master was

not primarily concerned with otherworldly affairs; instead, he committed
himself and persuaded the rulers to solve here-and-now social (govern-
ance!) problems by civilized means (Ames and Rosemont 1998; Li 1985).
Confucius famously said: ‘Dao bu yuanren’ (Tao is not far from man)
(Zhongyong, 13); ‘weineng shiren, yanneng shigui’ (Before serving the
human, how can one serve the spirit?) (Analects, 2/11). While knowledge is
highly valued, it is to be generated through this-worldly practice. Ban Gu
(32–92), a Han Dynasty scholar, wrote: ‘shishi qushi’ (seeking truth from
facts). The purpose is not to gain knowledge per se but to act on it wisely
(Nonaka and Zhu 2012, pp. 26–9). Lin Yutang (1895–1976), a popular
writer, compared the West-East ways thus: when come across an unknown
animal, to a Westerner the instinct question was ‘what is this?’ whereas to
a Chinese that would be ‘how to cook it?’ (Lin 1935). Solving real-world
problems, the wise do not begin with abstract necessities, absolute prin-
ciples or proven models: zi juexi (The Master was free from four things:
preconceptions, predeterminations, obstinacy and egoism) (Analects,
4/10). Instead he would start with situated particulars that were taken to
be forever transitional. Standing on the riverbank, The Master sighed:
shizhe ruxi fu (Isn’t life’s passing just like this, never ceasing day or night!)
(Analects, 9/17). Living in a world with wurong wuze (no fixed shapes nor
settled rules) (Huannanzi, 9/1/2), flexibility, adaptability and tolerance to
ambiguity are great virtues, and one needs to embrace diversity, seize upon
opportunities, invent unorthodox means and adjust objectives (Nonaka
and Zhu 2012, ch. 6). Confucianism is an ideology without ideological
obsessions; historically it has enriched itself by incorporating Taoist and
Buddhist teachings (Fung 1948, ch. 1). Such a pragmatic mindscape has

great political significance. Kracke commented decades ago: ‘Doctrinal

ambiguity thus allowed scope for experiment and adaptation without fatal
damage to ideals that might be unrealisable immediately’ (1964, p. 317). It
is the enduring Confucian practical philosophy that Deng and his reform-
ist alliance skilfully turned into a powerful weapon so as to combat the
Maoist ideology that still enjoyed status as official doctrine (Heilmann
2008a, 2008b; Pye 1988).
In the next section, we shall, based on the above legacies, explore a
‘home-grown rationale’ and a ‘longer temporal perspective’ (Li 2014,
p. 11), which will allow a better-informed analysis of China’s contempo-
rary reforms.
RATIONALE AND TENDENCY
Following Redding (2002), we use the term ‘rationale’, taken as a core

component of a culture, to encompass the purposes that give a society a
set of reasons for doing things (on the basis that the lens through which a
people sees reality implicit in it) with shared ideals of action and models of
institution (see also North 1990).
In the Confucian conception, humans live in a dynamic web of rela-
tions: with the world, with the mind and with others.3 We may call the
triadic relations wuli, shili and renli respectively, abbreviated to WSR. As
elaborated in the Daxue (Great Learning), a chapter in a classic Liji (Book
of Rites), the sages governed the triadic relations beneficially through
‘eight exemplary doings’. The ‘doings’ are usually grouped by modern
writers into three clusters: gewu (investigating things), zhizhi (extend-
ing knowledge); chengyi (being sincere), zhengxing (rectifying the mind),
xiushen (cultivating character); and qijia (managing the family), zhiguo
(governing the state), pingtianxia (pacifying the world) (see, e.g., Chan
1963; Chen 1986; Cheng 1972).4
Li as a noun denotes texture, pattern, reason, and so on, which can
be actual as well as virtual, for example the texture of jade, methods of
inquiry or patterns of conduct. As a verb it means to engage, care, order,
manage, serve, govern and so on. In the ‘highly suggestive’ Chinese tradi-
tion (Fung 1948, p. 14), the openness and richness of the meaning of li
is not unusual. This also applies to wu, shi and ren. In the following we
explore in a constructive mode the implications of WSR to governance.5
Wu means things, objects and structures that constitute ‘the world’, that
is, differentiated from and interacting with human agents. Wu are ‘actual’
and ‘objective’ in the sense that, natural or man-made, once in place they
facilitate or frustrate our actions irrespective of varied interpretations

until we have the chance and ability to change them. Accordingly, wuli
are the mechanisms that underpin the working of wu. Wu and wuli can be
resources or constraints on human actions, depending on circumstances
and our skills. Dealing with wuli, we act on technical rationality in order
to achieve efficiency. In the search for good governance, an obvious task
is hence to build (or enhance) a robust PA infrastructure, which usually
involves reconfiguring bureaucracy structures, transforming government
functions and establishing (or improving) rational–legal institutions.
Shi denotes human engagement with ‘the world’. Accordingly, shili is
about our capacity to act, about the habits and tendencies in which we
cope with life’s problems. It concerns worldview, learning ability and
professionalism. Public administrators are not robots whose only role
is to execute instructions; they are problem-solvers who need to inter-
pret unfolding particulars, make situated judgements, mobilize usable
resources and generate workable solutions so as to get jobs done amid
usually conflicting goals and unstable conditions. Governance with wuli
infrastructure alone in the absence of shili competence is like running
an engine without oil in it: however well the engine is designed, it will
not work properly. In light of shili, reforming PA aims to enhance the
governance capacity of the public as well as the administrators.
Ren is about human relations. At the heart of Confucianism is how
to act properly in the web of expectations, obligations and reciprocities.
Renli concerns values, ideals and ethics, and highlights the moral aspect of
human life. It is about responsibility and accountability, trust and legiti-
macy, that is, the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. In light of renli, good governance
demands that wuli infrastructure and shili competence be geared to serve
the higher purposes of the society. At the individual level, good govern-
ance relies on public administrators’ discipline, honesty and integrity. At
the supra-individual level, there must be high-standard responsibility and
credible accountability of governments. Over and above ‘How to manage?’
we must ask ‘To what end?’. It is good renli that gives the administration
machinery a worthwhile purpose and grants it legitimacy.
WSR is not intended to consist of rigorously separated categories that
capture the essence of the universe. Instead, it is better understood as
heuristic pointers to structure our investigation of what has been done in
the search for good governance, how it was done and why, as well as ideal
directions. As indicated in Figure 13.1, between wuli, shili and renli there
are complex mutual interactions. For example, wuli rational–legal institu-
tions may help to nurture clean and effective government (as the World
Bank once assumed); yet it can be used as a convenient tool by self-seeking
rulers to round up dissenting activists and political rivals, or by the rich
and powerful to protect their wealth of dubious origins (as still happens

Enhancing
meritocratic capacity
Building Serving
robust infrastructure higher purpose
Figure 13.1 WSR as a rationale for good governance and public

administration reform
around the world). Another example is transparency. Transparency is

obviously at the core of wuli institutions, but even in ‘mature’ societies
politicians and social ‘servants’ can still obscure transparency with skilled
cover-ups. Without good renli, transparency remains elusive. To grasp the
complex effects of wuli reforms we need to look at the matter from shili
and renli perspectives, and vice versa. Differentiation and interaction are
the two sides of the WSR coin.
If we consider the historical process, we can see that since Guan Zi con-
figured a state-dominant economy for the Qi state (eleventh century–221
bc), there were numerous reforms in China. In a broad perspective, what
lessons can be learned from history? Wu’s (2013) research draws attention
to two inert tendencies and a cyclical pattern.
The first tendency is jiquan (concentration of power). From Guan
Zi’s statism within a small kingdom in the seventh century bc to Qin Shi
Huangdi’s grand unification in 221 bc and after, political power in China
moved steadily towards the state through continuous experimentations,
refinements and sophistications. Totalitarian state power was supported
by four distinctive institutions: a junxian (prefecture- county) system
by which the state controlled the entire bureaucracy personnel; a zunru
(Confucianism worship) system that maintained the state’s total domina-
tion in ideas; a keju (civil-service examination) system that co-opted the
best talents to serve the state; and a guoyou zhuanying (state-monopoly)

system that ensured that the state owned and controlled strategic sectors.
Thanks to these four institutional pillars, the concentration of state
power had obtained near perfection and become, according to the
modern reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a gongli (truth) in Chinese
governance (cf. Wu 2013, p. 6).
The last institutional pillar, state- monopoly system, led to another
enduring tendency: yishang (restraining business, more precisely ‘restrain-
ing non-state business’). In Chinese governance, business is always political
and yishang ensures that no capital in private hands be significant enough
to challenge state domination. The rationale is to maintain national unity
and stability. Without referring to yishang, ‘government-function transfor-
mation’ has little meaning. As a state policy, yishang effectively turned the
government into an economic organization, institutionally yumin zhengli
(competing with the public for profit). Four ‘classic predicaments’ fol-
lowed. First, an institutionalized boundary between state and public, with
the former controlling strategic upstream resource sectors and the latter
struggling in downstream markets. Second, public interests were granted
by the ruler’s goodwill, not protected by laws, whereas the state’s legiti-
macy to rob the public was beyond question.6 Third, monopolistic state
enterprises gave rise to a persistent guanshang (official-businessman) model
characterized by rampant rent-seeking and extreme wealth concentration,
in which economic assets failed to grow via technological innovation, only
to be appropriated via state-controlled distribution. All this led to the
fourth predicament: private businesses lacked incentives for reinvestment,
and business profits tended to be used for hedonic consumption.
These two tendencies have underpinned the history of Chinese govern-
ance, no matter what ideology or polity the regimes adopted, from the
imperial to the republican to the nationalist and the communist. But there
was always, and still is, an inherent tension: although useful for maintain-
ing national unity, exclusive state power is incompatible with political
independence and business autonomy of the public, which are funda-
mental to sustained economic development. The rulers’ governance over
this inherent tension had been largely similar, resulting in decentralizing/
loosening–(re)centralizing/tightening cycles. To begin with, compelled
by the need to heal the economy in the aftermath of internal rebellions,
foreign invasions or natural disasters, rulers loosened control so that busi-
nesses could be revitalized from below. This quickly brought an economic
boom and generated wealth. Before long, local elites became too powerful
vis-à-vis the state. In the name of stability, the state then reconcentrated
power and tightened control. The result was a ‘strong’ state, a weakened
society, but also a deteriorated economy. Societal instability and crisis
followed. This completed a full cycle, and the next round began. How to

break away from such a fatal pattern remains a fundamental challenge to

China’s reformers.
EFFORTS AND CHALLENGES

In China’s official narrative post-Mao, PA has undertaken six rounds of
reform, and scholars have used varied schemata to analyse the reform
agendas. For example, Ngok and Zhu (2007) discern three stages: institu-
tional reconfiguration; functional transformation; and reshaping govern-
ment’s response to globalization; Xue and Zhong (2012) focus on four
aspects: government function; organizational structure; personnel man-
agement; and operations management; Cheung (2012b) presents five ele-
ments: restructuring and downsizing; cadre management and civil-service
system; fiscal reform; decentralization; and anti-corruption. Based on and
moving beyond these views, we structure the reforms in accordance with
the WSR rationales. Table 13.1 is a brief summary of the official agendas,
with the far-right column indicating a tentative WSR mapping of the
rationales that underlie the agendas (i.e., is a specific agenda intended to
improve rational–legal wuli institutions, to enhance administrators’ shili
capacities, to redefine state–society renli relations, or some form of combi-
nation?). Table 13.2 then groups the reform efforts under WSR headings
in order to investigate why the agendas are chosen, what has been gained
and what is missing, as well as problems and challenges.
Without claiming to be strictly scientific, the WSR mapping presented
in Tables 13.1 and 13.2 displays significant inroads in terms of the triadic
WSR rationale. The six rounds of reform demonstrate China’s determined
experimentation to ‘establish a market-based economic system, to separate
government from specific economic activities, and to facilitate China’s
integration with the global economy’ (Xue and Zhong 2012, pp. 299–300).
As an overall outcome, China has in the past decades (re)built an effective
administration machinery, evidenced by the state’s increasing abilities to
maintain order, generate wealth, improve living standards, respond to
disasters, co-opt non-state agencies and project national power.
However, the mapping also reveals considerable imbalance. To begin
with, wuli efficiency and managerialism appear to feature heavily in each
and every reform round: restructuring the state apparatus; downsizing
bureaucracy personnel; rationalizing government functions; setting up
e-government channels; passing a great number of laws; and strengthen-
ing enforcement bodies (Cheung, 2012b; Christensen et al. 2008; Ngok
and Zhu 2007; World Bank 2012; Xue and Zhong 2012; Zhang 2009). In
itself the insistent wuli effort is understandable given the tremendous task

Table 13.1 Major efforts in China’s post-Mao public administration

reforms
Rounds of Reform WSR

reform agendas mapping
Round 1: 1.1 Downsizing (e.g. State Council organs W
1982– reduced from 100 to 61)
1.2 Streamlining W
1.3 Reorganizing W
1.4 Increasing professionalism of public S
servants; imposing an age limit on
government positions
1.5 ‘Fiscal contracting’ system W–R
Round 2: 2.1 Downsizing (e.g. State Council organs W
1988– reduced from 72 to 65)
2.2 Government function reorientation W
2.3 Envisioning separation of the party W–R
apparatus from the government
2.4 Envisioning separation of the government W–R
from enterprises
2.5 Envisioning separation of ‘professional S–R
officers’ from ‘political officers’
2.6 Setting up Ministry of Personnel in charge S
of cadre system
2.7 Setting up Ministry of Supervision in S
charge of cadre performance
Round 3: 3.1 Merging and downgrading of State Council W
1993– organs (from 86 to 59)
3.2 Reducing central government personnel by W
20%
3.3 Reducing number of specialized economic W
ministries and departments
3.4 Setting up Provisional Regulations of State S–R
Civil Servants
3.5 ‘Tax-sharing’ system W–R
3.6 Establishing Company Law W–R
3.7 Enterprise corporatization W–R
3.8 ‘Grasping the large, letting go the small’ W–R
restructuring
Round 4: 4.1 Streamlining, downsizing and merging W
1998– (State Council organs reduced from 59
to 53; constituent departments from 40
to 29)
4.2 Number of central-level civil servants W
halved

Table 13.1 (continued)

Round 1: 4.3 Strengthening macro-control ministries W
1982– (e.g. renaming State Planning
Commission as State Development and
Planning Commission with reduced focus
on long-term development planning and
macro-management functions)
4.4 Eliminating the 15 industrial ministers W
4.5 Further corporatization W–R
4.6 Strengthening law enforcement/supervision W
departments and reinforcing their
functions
4.7 Functional reorientation W
4.8 Enhancing role of government in social W–R
security and services (with establishment
of Ministry of Labour and Social
Security)
4.9 Rural ‘tax for fee’ fiscal reform W-R
Round 5: 5.1 Transforming government’s role from W
2003– micro-management to
macro-management
5.2 Strengthening state assets management W-R
system (establishing State Assets
Supervisory Commission)
5.3 Improving macroeconomic control and W
regulatory regime (establishing
State Development and Reform
Commission)
5.4 Unifying domestic trade and foreign trade W
regime (establishing Ministry of
Commerce)
5.5 Stepping up food safety and production W
safety regulatory regime in light of
outbreak of SARS and food and
production safety scandals (establishing
State Food and Drugs Supervisory
Administration and upgrading the
State Production Safety Supervisory
Administration)
5.6 Promulgating Civil Service Law S
5.7 Abolishing agricultural tax R

Table 13.1 (continued)

Round 6: 6.1 Separating government function into W
2008– decision-making, execution and
supervision
6.2 Adopting ‘super-ministry’ model (reducing W
ministries and ministry-level organs to
27)
Source: Adopted from Cheung (2012b); Dong et al. (2008); Ngok and Zhu (2007); Xue
and Zhong (2012).
Table 13.2 Mapping WSR rationale, official rhetoric and reform efforts
Rationale Wuli efficiency Shili competence Renli legitimacy

Building robust Enhancing Serving higher
infrastructure meritocratic capacity purpose
Official Tizhi gaige Tigao zhizheng Yiren weiben (people
rhetoric (reconfiguring nengli (enhancing first)
structures) governance Hexie shehui
Jingjian jigou capacity) (harmonious
(downsizing Tigao zongti suzhi society)
structures) (increasing overall Kexue fazhan
Zhengfu zhineng quality) (scientific
zhuanhuan Gongwuyuan de gao development)
(transforming sushi (social Guotui minjin (the
government servants’ high state retreats, the
functions) quality) public advances)
Yifa zhiguo
(governing by law)
Reform 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 2.1, 1.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 1.5, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.4,
efforts 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 5.6 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 4.5,
3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 4.8, 4.9, 5.2, 5.7
4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5,
4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 5.1,
5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1,
6.2

facing the reformers – to (re)build a Weberian PA on the debris of Mao’s

total destruction of the state bureaucracy. The official rhetoric (listed in
Table 13.2 under the wuli heading) clearly reflects the ruling elites’ sense
of urgency, and the determined efforts have produced impressive PA
efficiency that China can showcase with justifiable pride.
Meanwhile, shili and renli reforms have been problematic. In the early
years, under the slogan of jiefang sixiang (emancipating the mind), the
Chinese leadership appeared to favour all- embracing reforms, which
quickly gained wide support from the society (Ma and Ling 1998; Yang
2007). This allowed the then Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang to
pronounce at the 13th Party Congress in 1987 an ambitious agenda:
separating the party from government; separating government from
enterprises; and separating government from society (Agendas 2.3, 2.4
and 2.5; see Table 13.1). Zhao’s agenda suffered a prompt rupture due to
the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989. In the shadow of wending yadao
yiqie (stability over everything else), PA reform since then has experi-
enced twists and turns (Cheung 2012b, pp. 265–6; Xue and Zhong 2012,
pp. 293–4). On the shili front, in the early 1980s Deng Xiaoping introduced
the sihua (four modernizations) criteria for cadre selection: revolutionary
(reform-minded); younger; better educated; and professionally compe-
tent (Zhong 2003, p. 109); and if Zhao succeeded, ‘professional officers’
(career bureaucrats) would be separated from ‘political officers’ (politi-
cians) and be appointed based on professional qualities, not party loyalty
(Burns 1989). Post-Tiananmen politics put all this on hold (Chan 2010).
The promulgation of the Provisional Civil Service Regulations in 1993
(Agenda 3.4) reaffirmed the dang guan ganbu (party managing cadres)
principle, replaced the separation between politicians and bureaucrats
with the division between ‘leadership’ and ‘non- leadership’ positions.
Then the Civil Service Law (passed in 2005, effective 2006) (Agenda 5.6)
finally institutionalized the bureaucracy’s royalty to the Party, according
to which social servants
shall conform to the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought,

Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents, follow
the basic line of the primary stage of socialism, observe the line and policies of
the Communist Party of China on cadre matters and adhere to the principle
that the Party exercises leadership over cadre matters. (Civil Service Law,
Article 4)
In theory and in practice, therefore, the imperial meritocracy of ‘com-

petence and virtue’ is transformed into a peculiar form of technocracy:
‘professionally competent and politically obedient to the party’ (Cheung
2012b, p. 266). Despite the official rhetoric (listed in Table 13.2 under

the shili heading), shili enhancement is largely symbolic (Chou 2004) and
leaves a ‘governance-capacity deficit’ (Wang 2003, p. 41). It is a reversal,
instead of an advancement, of the internationally envied Chinese bureau-
cracy tradition. This reflects a fundamental tension in the leadership’s
handling of renli: legitimacy in terms of what? Supposing a well-trained
and disciplined PA indeed emerges from the reforms, to whom should it
be accountable: the society or the one-and-only party? In imperial times
the answer was relatively clear; in the era of ‘modernization’ it is less so. At
the 13th Party Congress in 1987, the China leadership appeared to engage
with these critical questions (Agendas 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5), and in the early
1980s Deng Xiaoping envisaged wider and deeper political reforms.7 But
since then reluctance and ambivalence have prevailed. The timid appear-
ances of official shili and renli agendas skim the surface of the no-go area
and limits of the current reforms. In a popular phrase in contemporary
Chinese political discourse, this is the shenshuiqu (deep-water zone) that
the current reformers will be unable to avoid for long.
In retrospect, post-Mao reform has gone through two distinct phases,
with the mid-1990s as the turning point (Huang 2008; Wang 2003; Wu
2010; Wu 2013). Viewed from a broad historical perspective, the trajec-
tory conforms to the decentralizing/loosening–(re)centralizing/tightening
grand cycle along the jiquan (concentration of state power) and yishang
(restraining non-state business) historical tendencies. This is evident in
fiscal-taxation reforms and industry restructuring.
In the early phase, a caizheng baogan (fiscal-contracting) system was
adopted in the 1980s (Agenda 1.5) that allowed local governments to
retain revenues after reaching an agreed target. Incentivized by the system,
local governments rapidly increased their revenue by promoting local
economies and ‘off-budget revenue’ measures. Meanwhile, the centre’s
fiscal revenue declined steadily, down from a 34 per cent budgetary share
of GDP in 1978 to 10.8 per cent in 1995. Then, in the second phase, a
sweeping fiscal-taxation reform in 1994 replaced the revenue remittance
mechanism with a fenshuizhi (tax-sharing system) (Agenda 3.5). The new
system assigned different categories of taxes between the central and local
governments so that the centre first collected the bulk of revenues and then
shared it with the locals. This dramatically boosted the centre’s share of
revenue: within one year the central fiscal revenue jumped from RMB95.7
billion yuan to 290 billion yuan, while local revenue dropped from 339
billion to 231 billion (Chen and Chun 2004, pp. 93–4). The centre now
controls over 50 per cent of all revenues, and leaves local governments
waiting for rebates (Naughton 2007, pp. 430–36). This puts the central
government in a strong position vis-à-vis locals, and hence completes a
decentralization–(re)centralization cycle along jiquan (Wu 2013).

In 1995, according to State Council data, over 40 per cent of state

enterprises were in the red, with an average debt rate of 78.9 per cent; the
2600-strong core state enterprises possessed 264.4 billion yuan of assets
while accumulating 200.7 billion yuan debt. Since then, the situation has
changed beyond recognition. By the end of 2012, the 120 yangqi (state
enterprise under the State Assets Supervisory Commission) with 31.2
trillion yuan assets realized 22.5 trillion yuan revenue. To put the perfor-
mance in perspective, the figures for the private sector are 10.9 million
enterprises, 31.1 trillion yuan of assets and 20.1 trillion yuan of revenue. It
is a game of one state enterprise versus 100 000 private enterprises, and the
state appears to be winning: of all the assets of the Chinese 500 enterprises
in 2006, the state owns 98.36 per cent (Wu 2013, p. 226). State enterprises
today are not just powerful; they are extremely profitable, with return on
assets increasing from 0.7 per cent in 1998 to 6.3 per cent in 2006 (The
Economist 2012, p. 4). The five state banks alone earned a profit of 1 tril-
lion yuan in 2012, twice that of the top 500 private enterprises as a whole
(Wu 2013, p. 226); ‘By profit, Chinese banks take the top four places in
the global league tables’ (The Times 2013).
The change of fortune is the result of dedicated yishang agendas in the
second reform phase: the establishment of the Company Law in 1994, the
subsequent gongsihua (corporatization) programme, the zhuada fangxiao
(grasping the large, letting go the small) policy in 1997 and the establish-
ment of the State Assets Supervisory Commission in 2003 (Agendas 3.6,
3.7, 3.8, 4.5 and 5.2). These powerful means enable the central government
to focus attention on the largest state firms, bundle them into even larger
enterprise groups, and refinance them with domestic and overseas capital
while keeping them firmly under state control. Under the somewhat mis-
leading guotui minjin (the state retreats, the public advances) rhetoric (see
Table 13.2 under the renli heading), state firms withdrew from competitive
downstream sectors while consolidating their domination in upstream
‘commanding heights’. This allowed the state to control the economy
without competing directly with the private sector. Meanwhile, in ‘letting
go the small’, local authorities were given free rein in closing down and
selling off loss-making state enterprises. As the reform proceeded, private
enterprises found themselves blocked from entering profitable sectors
while struggling for knife- edge margins in downstream markets. To
achieve such ‘profitable state monopoly’ (Huang 2008, p. 240), a price
had to be paid: state firms laid off 40 per cent of the workforce and tens
of billions of foreign reserves were used to fill the state-sector black holes
(Naughton 2007, p. 301; Wu 2013). The state does not retreat; it merely
regroups (Sigley 2006).8 The thousands-year-old yishang tendency is in
full play. If the early reforms were propelled mainly by tizhi wai (outside

the system) innovation and growth (Wu 2010), the second phase reversed
the market-promoting process, allowed the state to regain some sort of
initiative and strengthen its capacity to ‘govern the market’.
And what are the consequences? Despite the vast changes made in
‘modernizing’ the Leninist-Maoist state, China today is facing serious
problems: extreme inequality; rampant corruption; total destruction of
the moral bottom line; large-scale pollution; and alarming social unrest.
National unity and stability, and the rulers’ ‘Mandate of Heaven’,9 are
under severe test. Across the political spectrum in China there are no
longer arguments about the problems; disagreements are squarely on
solutions (Ma 2012). The critical question is: as official reforms have so
far proved unable to pursue a WSR-balanced agenda while succumbing to
jiquan-yishang tendencies, is it possible that governance in China will ever
break away from the fatal historical cycle and, if so, where is the driving
force?
AGENCY AND PROCESS
That the Chinese expect the government to take the lead is well known; less
noticed is the fact that a similar mentality dominates the study of Chinese
PA reforms. Official agendas and state politics occupy almost the entire
research attention, whereas actions at the local level, if mentioned at all,
are treated as implementing or resisting state directives. In the perceived
zero-sum game, the state is the principal; below it are the agents. Should
the locals comply fully, the centre’s master plan would have succeeded.
Here we have an agency deficit (Li 2006a; Zhu 2008). While it is quite
true that in China ‘the party act[s] as both the driver of reform but also
the largest counterweight to more fundamental transformation’ (Cheung
2012b, p. 277), ignoring the contribution of non-state agencies will leave
our understanding of reform incomplete and a break from historical cycles
unimaginable.10 To illustrate this, the rural fiscal reform and the abolition
of agricultural tax (Agendas 4.9 and 5.7) constitute a good case.
The official narrative runs like this. Due to Mao’s industry-centred
fiscal legacy, and as the country edged away from central planning in
the 1980s, rural administration and public services were left unfunded.
County and township finance in the 1990s deteriorated further when
township–village enterprises were restructured into private enterprises, on
the one hand, and the 1994 ‘tax-sharing’ system greatly reduced the local
portion of tax collected, on the other. How bad was the situation? A 1996
State Council Research Centre report estimated that 63 per cent of county
governments were in debt; a 2001 Ministry of Civil Affairs report showed

that the average township debt was 4 million yuan, while at that time a
normal township annual budget was merely 1 to 2 million yuan. And the
gap was growing: between 1986 and 1995, township government expendi-
ture grew by 22.5 per cent per year, far exceeding the 15.6 per cent growth
of budgetary income (Yep 2004, p. 56). Rural governments were steadily
‘hollowing out’ (Heimer 2004; Kennedy 2007).
To make ends meet, local governments resorted to yusuanwai shouru
(extra-budgetary revenues). Subnational fees and surcharges collected as a
percentage of GDP jumped from 2.6 per cent (23.3 billion yuan) in 1985 to
8.8 per cent (600 billion yuan) in 1996. By 1997, the total number of local
fees reached 6800; a marriage registration, for example, would charge over
20 kinds of fee (Chen and Chun 2004; Yep 2004, pp. 46–7). At the same
time, local governments minimized public services. Despite paying all the
taxes and fees, peasants had to pay out of pocket for health services, some
village schools were closed, and social welfare, water irrigation and public
transport were depleted (Huang 2004; Li 2008, p. 260).
In these circumstances the rural fei gai shui (tax-for-fee) reform was the
centre’s strategy to discipline local officials and to reduce the peasants’
burden. In September 1998 Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin real-
ized the need to tighten controls on local extraction; in October the Party
Central Committee Plenum endorsed rural fiscal reform as a national
policy. In the same year, Premier Zhu Rongji announced a plan to allo-
cate 20–30 billion yuan annually to finance the reform. A formal reform
package was promulgated in 2000 and adopted nationwide from 2002–03.
The package was designed to abolish the majority of rural fees, downsize
township bureaucracy and rationalize public services. At the same time,
agricultural tax was raised from 3 per cent to a cap of 7 per cent in order
to compensate townships for their loss of fee/surcharge incomes. Central
subsidy for township-bureaucracy downsizing was 24.5 billion yuan in
2002, increasing to 54.6 billion in 2004 and 78 billion in 2006. As local
governments failed in their service duties, the central government had to
step in: in the 2006 national budget, 340 billion yuan was allocated to rural
public services; in 2007 and 2008 the figures climbed to 430 billion and 562
billion respectively (Li 2008, p. 260). In 2003 the Hu Jingtao–Wen Jiabao
leadership announced the decision to phase out the tax on agriculture
in five years. As the Chinese economy developed fast and the national
financial situation improved, in 2006 the central government abolished
agricultural tax and launched a jianshe shehui zhuyi xin nongcun (construct
a socialist new countryside) campaign. Despite ups and downs, the centre
was able to dismantle local distortions and steer the rural fiscal reform
steadily to completion. Premier Wen Jiabao described the achievement as
‘a result of central government’s planning’ (Li 2006b, p. 90).

There can be, however, other narratives. Chen and Chun (2004), for
example, draw our attention to earlier events and local levels. The story
begins with a humble man, He Kaiyin. When he was a young student in
Beijing Agriculture University in 1957, Kaiyin was labelled a ‘rightist’ and
packed to the far north. He worked on a farm for 20 years until return-
ing to his birthplace, Anhui (a key agricultural province), after Mao’s
death. Instead of retreating into a mode of victimhood, Kaiyin committed
himself to the first wave of reform. In those exciting days he befriended the
prefecture party secretary Wang Yuzhao, who took a great risk to support
the peasants’ dabaogan (contracting farming to household) experiment,
which eventually decollectivized rural China. When Wang was promoted
to be the governor of Anhui, Kaiyin became a researcher in the provincial
government. Then Wang was further promoted to be a rural-policy leader
in Beijing. In 1988, Wang informed Kaiyin of a forthcoming national
essay competition to commemorate a full decade of rural reform. Kaiyin
was encouraged because he had things to say. After ten years, the liberat-
ing effect of dabaogan had diminished and rural China was in trouble. The
waves of nongmingong (immigrant peasant workers) in (and since) the late
1980s signalled the magnitude of the problems: farming no longer gener-
ated income due to high price inputs; peasants became poorer because
of proliferating local fees; and as youth labour left the land, agricultural
output and productivity declined. Kaiyin submitted an essay to the com-
petition, analysing the problems and arguing for further reforms. The
essay won an ‘excellent paper’ award.
Then, in 1989, the political climate changed. Once a ‘rightist’, always a
‘rightist’, however: Kaiyin further turned his analysis into a proposal that
would consolidate all rural taxes, fees and surcharges into a standardized
agricultural tax, of which a certain portion would be used to finance local
administration and beyond which no one could charge the peasants a
penny. Kaiyin regarded this as a second dabaogan. He prepared to submit
his proposal to the Central Rural Policy Research Centre where his friend
Wang Yuzhao was vice director, only to be told that the Centre had
been scrapped shortly after the Tiananmen Square Incident. He was also
warned of criticism in Beijing against his award-winning essay.
Undeterred, Kaiyin determined to appeal directly to the centre. He sent
his proposal to the Anhui Bureau of the Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua
had a dual role in reporting news publicly and collecting intelligence
for senior leaders. Kaiyin’s proposal was reported in February 1990 in
Xinhua’s ‘internal reference reports’ and People’s Daily’s ‘internal sup-
plements’, and subsequently appeared in the State Council’s ‘reference
bulletin’. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, however, no official would say
a single word about it. Then, one year later, in February 1991, Kaiyin was

called into Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the party state in Beijing, to

be informed that Premier Li Peng was interested in the proposal and sug-
gested that Kaiyin put forward operable programmes. When Kaiyin asked
for a written document or note, he was told that it would not be appropri-
ate because that would turn the premier’s vision into an official campaign.
Kaiyin was encouraged to conduct pilot projects in Anhui. Three months
later, he submitted to the Anhui government a refined proposal of ten
detailed programmes. In the subsequent months Kaiyin received confus-
ing signals from provincial leaders, simply unable to put his proposal into
practice. He was merely a humble researcher, with no power to initiate
experiment anywhere.
Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 ‘Southern tour’ changed that. That year, at a
local meeting in Anhui, Kaiyin met the heavyweight rural policy advo-
cate Du Runsheng, and passed to him his tax-for-fee proposal. Du was
deeply impressed, but due to full engagements he introduced Kaiyin to
Party Secretary Wang Zhaoyao of the Fengyang Prefecture. It was a
historical coincidence: in 1978 it was the 18 Xiaogang village peasants
in Fengyang who kicked off China’s reform by secretly dividing farming
between households. Wang took Kaiyin one level down the administrative
hierarchy – the counties – to look for reform volunteers. Wang persistently
distanced himself from any decision, but his appearance together with
Kaiyin spoke volumes. They went to Yongshang and Woyang counties.
In both places Kaiyin’s proposal divided the county leadership sharply.
Open-minded leaders enthusiastically embraced the proposal, whereas
critics firmly rejected it. The critics had good reasons. The proposal was
incompatible with existing laws and there were clear disapprovals from
much higher authorities. China’s taxation law was established in the
heyday of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, yet it was still the
policy foundation in the 1990s despite the changes that had occurred since
1978. While reform is by definition changing the status quo, it is a risky
undertaking until the status quo gets changed, and the absence of consen-
sus increases immensely the risk of local-level reformers, particularly in
circumstances where centralized authoritarianism is deep and strong. The
Yongshang and Woyang experience reminded Kaiyin once again who he
was, where he was and what he was doing.
Just as the county meetings ended in controversy, a breakthrough
occurred below this level. In Xinxing Township, Secretary Liu Xingjie and
Mayor Li Peijie worked out a simplified way to collect revenue through a
one-off collection of combined taxes and fees. As township leaders, Liu
and Li dealt directly with the peasants; they had long been troubled by the
task of collecting numerous fees from the peasants, on the one hand, and
the daily deepening plight of the villages, on the other. ‘Risk?’ Liu said

to his colleagues. ‘I am the son of a peasant and was born in Xinxing. If

I only collect money and do nothing good, how can I look in the eyes of
my parents and fellow villagers?’ Liu and Li did not know Kaiyin; their
work plan was inspired by the experience in Hebei Province and a report
in Nongmin Ribao (Peasants’ Daily). Led by Liu and Li, Xinxing officials
presented their plan to the peasants. With their enthusiastic response,
Liu and Li turned to county leaders for support. County Secretary Wang
Baoming and Director Wang Binyu, who failed to gain consensus at the
county level, lent their support to the Xinxing experiment. In November
1992 Xinxing People’s Congress approved Liu and Li’s plan, and on
1 January 1993 Xinxing embarked on a township-wide tax-for-fee reform.
The road ahead was still rocky and painful. Not long afterwards,
Xinxing’s reform was ordered to stop; other similar experiments faced the
same fate. Kaiyin experienced repeated ups and downs. He was a reform
hero on day one, a trouble-maker on day two, and would be listened to
again on day three. He missed deserved salary increases and housing-
reform benefits. In the low times, he began to drink and smoke; he was
tortured by a burning concern for rural China on the one hand and his
powerlessness to make a real difference on the other. In the end, the peas-
ants’ action spoke loudest. When Taihe County gave Kaiyin’s proposal
a try in 1994, the 300 000 peasant households in the 31 townships across
the county completed paying tax within just five days, a phenomenon not
seen in the history of the People’s Republic. Before the reform, cadres had
to chase for taxes and fees door to door, some using force, while even the
cadres themselves were confused by the numerous taxes and fees. Now the
peasants queued up at the township doors to pay their tax. Some cadres
were moved to tears; they regained a sense of honesty, integrity and moral
purpose: ‘It is really a second liberation since dabaogan.’ The effect: the
peasants’ burden decreased and the tax collected increased. By the end
of 1994, tax-for-fee practice, still illegal, spread over 50 counties in seven
provinces. After further setbacks and frustrations, on 30 December 1996
the Party and the State Council jointly issued the famous Document No.
13 that paved the way to making rural fiscal reform official. The rest
appeared to be history. Since Kaiyin submitted his award-winning essay
in 1988, 15 years had passed until his idea was adopted as a nationwide
practice; as to the abolition of agricultural tax, 18 years.
Kaiyin was not alone. The stories of Yang Wenliang, a policy researcher
in the Hebei provincial government, and Song Yaping, the party sec-
retary of Xian’an District in Hubei Province, are as enlightening as
Keiyin’s (Fewsmith 2010; Li 2008). Former township Party Secretary
Li Changping’s open letter ‘Telling the Truth to the Premier’ and the
two rural reporters’ article, ‘A survey of the Chinese peasants’, shocked

society: ‘The peasants are really suffering, the countryside is really poor,
and agriculture is really in danger.’ A young peasant, Ding Zuoming, was
beaten to death by local cadres because he dared to report to the authority
corrupt fee-and-surcharge practices in the village; that was on 21 February
1993 in Lixin County of Anhui Province. Ding Zuoming’s death touched
society’s conscience and put the peasants’ plight in focus (Chen and Chun
2004). Before the central government decided to abolish the agricultural
tax, in 2002 Shunde District in Guangdong Province chose to adopt the
lower official rural tax rate; Anhui did the same, across the whole prov-
ince. Guangdong went further in 2003, suspending the officially allowed
20 per cent surcharge on agricultural tax. These collective bottom-rate
choices from below effectively made the centre’s tax cap redundant,
induced the centre to make frequent post hoc endorsements and eventually
to abolish agricultural tax (Li 2006a).
So, who led the rural fiscal reform and who abolished the agricultural
tax? The above narrative does not deny the role of the elites at the centre.
Indeed, the reform bears the fingerprints of all the leaders at the highest
level. Without their final approval, tax-for-fee would not have become
an official policy with nationwide effects. More importantly, the elites’
tolerance, and sometimes encouragement, allowed policy innovations to
emerge, be refined and show beneficial effects. Seeking truth from the
facts, between ideology and pragmatism the elites had made a wise choice.
Unknowingly, they acted according to the Confucian practical tradition.
The point is that reforms are no longer the exclusive property of the
elites. Without a master plan, the tax-for-fee reform emerged from the
contingent interactions of the dispersed agency of the individual as well
as collective actors across the societal hierarchy.11 Recall Kaiyin, his met
and unmet comrades, the kind and not-so-kind leaders, the officials at dif-
ferent ranks across regions, the writers and reporters who ‘just did their
job’, the voiceless farmers, including Ding Zuoming, and the concerned
public. Driven by different interests and motives, equipped with different
experiences and resources, actors engaged in the reform at different places
and different times. Their levels of commitment and attitudes towards risk
also varied. Not surprisingly, their contributions differed dramatically.
Nevertheless, it is their divergent, seemingly unconnected efforts that col-
lectively moved the reform forward, not by design but contingently. Put
another way, the reform invited the dispersed agency into action at dif-
ferent junctures and in different ways. While no one can design detailed
outcomes by a magic stroke, the micro, flowing interactions of dispersed
agency generate macro, consequential patterns. As actors were ‘embedded’
in ‘legacies’, for example the existing laws and the actors’ experiences, the
process was path-dependent and displayed continuity; yet the contingent

twists and turns along the way allowed the actors to experiment, to inno-
vate, to initiate changes and create new paths. Despite unforeseeable
uncertainty and challenges ahead, it is from such a perspective of dispersed
agency and contingent process that we see the possibility of breaking away
from fatalistic historical cycles and of the emergence of good governance.
In the end, Mao is right: the people, and only the people, are the driving
force of history.
CONCLUSION: GOVERNANCE WITH CHINESE

CHARACTERISTICS?
if we want socialism to achieve superiority over capitalism, we should not
hesitate to draw on the achievements of all cultures and to learn from
other countries, including the developed capitalist countries. (Deng 1994,
pp. 361–2)
Deng’s prescription signals, at least to the Chinese, that the added value of
the abstract convergence–divergence debate is diminishing. The interest-
ing question now becomes: in what respects should PA follow common
patterns or display continuing differences, and how? The WSR rationale
may be a useful tool to construct hypotheses for empirical investigations.
Since good governance cannot be based on inefficiency, rational–legal wuli
imperatives are likely to generate similar agendas across countries. As to
the renli aspect, convergence might be more complicated because socie-
ties differ in their ideal social models. But, even here, the renli rationale
in itself may have global implications. The debt-ceiling deadlocks that
paralyse Washington and the timid banking-sector reforms since 2008,
for example, may reveal a renli deficit: governance in the world’s most
‘advanced’ societies has lost its moral purpose. Furthermore, as Dong et
al. (2008) illustrate, ‘learning from the West’ can be highly innovative. As
post-NPM becomes less preoccupied with mergers and restructuring, in
2008 the elites in China sold the dabuzhi (‘super-department’ model) as
‘latest international best practice’ to the public and established it as the
core agenda in the latest round of reform. Whether ‘super-departments’
actually deliver efficiency is a matter for empirical investigation; intrigu-
ing here is the skilled manufacturing of international solutions to locally
perceived problems. Dong et al. call this ‘biased contextualisation’. But is
‘bias’ always a bad thing, why does it occur, how should it be judged, and
on what grounds? PA and governance should expect more, better-refined
experimentation and inquiry.
Informed by historical legacies (first section), this chapter presents a
home-grown rationale and a broad process perspective that allows us to

analyse China’s reform on its own terms (second section). Our analysis
illustrates that, while momentous changes have occurred in post-Mao gov-
ernance, official reforms largely fell short of efficiency–capacity–legitimacy
balanced agendas while tending to conform to inert historical tendencies
(third section). We can nevertheless be hopeful because reforms are no
longer the exclusive property of the elites, and good governance will prob-
ably be the outcome of contingent interactions of dispersed agency actors
(fourth section). China’s reform has displayed historical continuity as
well as skilful learning from the West, which will probably continue. We
conclude this chapter with the idea that ‘convergence’ to a single model,
of whatever kind, even if possible, will do humankind no good since, in an
uncertain world, ‘The society that permits the maximum generation of trials
will be most likely to solve problems through time’ (North 1990, p. 82).
NOTES
1. When China embarked on the recent reforms, under the central government there were
30 provinces and municipalities, most of which are bigger than an average European
country, around 340 districts and cities, 2600 counties, and 48 000 communes (now
townships).
2. Faure (2006) contents that it is ‘almost exactly’ these same institutions that proved
inadequate for handling the scale of operations of modern enterprises therefore unable
to grow the Ming-Qing Chinese ‘sprouts of capitalism’ into fruition, a view echoed by
Redding and Witt (2007).
3. The ‘last great Confucian’, Liang Shuming, used a slightly different frame: relations
with the world, with the self and with others (see Liang 2008).
4. The Eight Exemplary Doings is elaborated in Section 2 of the Preface of the Great
Learning thus:
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well
their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to
regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they
first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their
thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowl-
edge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their
thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts
being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were
regulated. Their families being regulated their states were rightly governed. Their states being
rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
5. For the WSR rationale in corporate and reform strategy see Nonaka and Zhu (2012);
Zhu (2007).
6. For this point, see also Cohen (1988, p. 520); Goldman (1983, pp. 111–12); Kirby
(1995); Nathan (1986, p. 114).
7. See, e.g., Deng’s famous speech (13 December 1978), ‘Emancipate the mind, seek truth
from facts and unite as one in looking to the future’ (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/
dengxp/vol2/text/b1260.html).
8. The nature of ‘state retreat’ is made clear insistently in Chinese government documents,
public media and academic publications, such as the following:


Any attempt to weaken government power and function is very dangerous. In the process of
establishing a socialist market economy the function of the government must be strengthened. Of
course the kind of strengthening that takes place must accord with and satisfy the demands of the
market economy. (Zhang 1996, p. 19)
9. The Chinese Communist Party claims a self-granted lishi shiming (mandate of history) –
the quasi-religion of Marxist historical materialism into which the developmentalist
economic growth and global capitalism have in recent times been shrewdly incorpo-
rated (Nitsch and Diebel 2007, p. 977).
10. Compared with PA reform, non-state agencies are studied more keenly in relation
to economic reforms; see, for example, Kelliher (1992); Nee and Opper (2012); Zhou
(1996); Zhu (2008).
11. Garud and Karnøe (2005) use a slightly different term, ‘distributed agency’. Considering
that ‘distributed agency’ can be interpreted as being distributed by some specific actors,
I choose to use the term ‘dispersed agency’ in order to avoid misunderstanding.
‘Dispersed agency’ is in my view closer to Hayek’s (1945) ‘knowledge in society’ without
distributor(s).
REFERENCES
Ames, R.T. and H. Rosemont (1998), The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation,
New York: Ballantine Books.
Balazs, E. (1965), Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Bays, D. (1976), ‘Chang Chih-tung after the “100 Days”: 1898–1900 as a transitional period
for reform constituencies’, in P.A. Cohen and J.E. Schrecker (eds), Reform in Nineteen-
Century China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, East Asian Research Centre,
pp. 317–25.
Burns, J.P. (1989), ‘Chinese civil service reform: the 13th Party Congress proposals’, China
Quarterly, 120, 739–70.
Caulfield, J.L. (2006), ‘Local government reform in China: a rational actor perspective’,
International Review of Administrative Science, 72 (2), 253–67.
Chan, H.S. (2010), ‘Envisioning public administration as a scholarly field in 2020: the quest
for meritocracy in the Chinese bureaucracy’, Public Administration Review, 70 (Special
Issue), S302–S303.
Chan, W.T. (1963), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Chen, G. and T. Chun (2004), ‘A survey of the Chinese peasants’, Dangdai, No. 6. (in
Chinese).
Chen, L.F. (1986), The Confucian Way: A New and Systematic Study of ‘The Four Books’,
London: KPI.
Cheng, C.Y. (1972), ‘Chinese philosophy: a characterisation’, in A. Naess and A. Hannay
(eds), Invitation to Chinese Philosophy, Oslo–Bergen–Tromso: Scandinavian University
Books, pp. 141–66.
Cheung, A.B.L. (2012a), ‘Public administration in East Asia: legacies, trajectories and
lessons’, International Review of Administrative Science, 78 (2), 209–16.
Cheung, A.B.L. (2012b), ‘One country, two experiences: administrative reforms in China and
Hong Kong’, International Review of Administrative Science, 78 (2), 261–83.
Chou, B.K.P. (2004), ‘Civil service reform in China, 1993–2001: a case of implementation
failure’. China: An International Journal, 2 (2), 210–34.
Christensen, T., L. Dong and M. Painter (2008), ‘Administrative reform in China’s
central government – how much “learning from the West?”’, International Review of
Administrative Science, 74 (3), 351–71.

Cohen, P.A. (1988), ‘The post-Mao reforms in historical perspective’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 47 (3), 519–41.
Deng, X. (1994), Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 3: (1982–1992), Beijing: Foreign
Language Press.
Dong, L., T. Christensen and M. Painter (2008), ‘A case study of China’s administra-
tive reform: the importation of the super- department’, American Review of Public
Drechsler, W. (2013), ‘Wang Anshi and the origins of modern public management in Song
Dynasty China’, Public Money and Management, 33 (5), 353–60.
The Economist (2012), ‘Special report: State capitalism’, 21 January.
Faure, D. (2006), China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China,
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Fewsmith, J. (2010), ‘Institutional reforms in Xian’an’, China Leadership Monitor, No. 33.
Fukuyama, F. (2011), The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French
Revolution, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Fung, Y. (1948), A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, New York: Free Press.
Garud, R. and P. Karnøe (2005), ‘Distributed agency and interactive emergence’, in
S. W. Floyd, J. Roos, C. D. Jacobs and F.W. Kellermanns (eds), Innovating Strategy
Process, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 88–96.
Goldman, M. (1983), ‘Human rights in People’s Republic of China’, Daedalus, 112 (4),
111–38.
Greel, H.G. (1964), ‘The beginning of bureaucracy in China: the origin of the hsien’, Journal
of Asian Studies, 23, 155–84.
Grieder, J. (1981), Intellectuals and the State in Modern China: A Narrative History, New
York: Free Press.
Hamilton, G.G. (2006). Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies, London: Routledge.
Hayek, F.A. (1945), ‘The use of knowledge in society’, American Economic Review, 35 (4),
519–30.
Heilmann, S. (2008a), ‘Policy experimentation in China’s economic rise’, Studies in
Comparative International Development, 43 (1), 1–26.
Heilmann, S. (2008b), ‘From local experiments to national policy: the origins of China’s
distinctive policy process’, The China Journal, No. 59, 1–30.
Heimer, E.M. (2004), ‘Taking an aspirin: implementing tax and fee reform at the grassroots’,
paper presented at the Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China Conference,
Fairbank Centre, Harvard University, 29–31 October.
Hood, C. (2005), ‘Public management: the word, the movement, the science’, in E. Perlie,
L.E. Lynn and C. Pollitt (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Public Management, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 7–26.
Huang, Y.S. (2008), Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Huang, Y.Z. (2004), ‘Bringing the local state back in: the political economy of public health
in rural China’, Journal of Contemporary China, 13 (39), 367–90.
Jacques, M. (2009), When China Ruled the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the
End of the Western World, London: Penguin.
Kelliher, D. (1992), Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural Reform, 1979–1989, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kennedy, J.J. (2007), ‘From the tax-for-fee reform to the abolition of agricultural taxes: the
impact on township governments in north-west China’, The China Quarterly, 189 (March),
43–59.
Kirby, W.C. (1995), ‘China unincorporated: company law and business enterprise in
twentieth-century China’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54 (1), 43–63.
Kracke, E.A. (1964), ‘The Chinese and the art of government’, in R.C. Dawson (ed.), The
Legacy of China, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 309–39.
Li, L.C. (2006a), ‘Differentiated actors: central–local politics in China’s rural tax reforms’,
Modern Asian Studies, 40 (1), 151–74.

Li, L.C. (2006b), ‘Working for the peasants? Strategic interactions and unintended conse-
quences in the Chinese rural tax reform’, The China Journal, 57 (January), 89–106.
Li, L.C. (2008), ‘State and market in public service provision: opportunities and traps for
institutional change in rural China’, The Pacific Review, 21 (3), 257–78.
Li, L.C. (2014), ‘Multiple trajectories and “good governance” in Asia: an introduction’,
Journal of Contemporary Asia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2013.871836.
Li, Z. (1985), Commentary on the History of Ancient Chinese Thought, Beijing: People’s Press
(in Chinese).
Liang, S. (2008), An Overview of Oriental Scholarship, Nanjing: Jiangsu Literature and Art
Publishing House (in Chinese).
Lin, Y. (1935), My Country and My People, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.
Lindblom, C.E. (1977), Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems, New
York: Basic Books.
Ma, L. (2012), Eight Social Thoughts in Contemporary China, Beijing: Social Sciences
Academic Press (in Chinese).
Ma, L. and Z. Ling (1998), Cross Swords: Documentary of the Three Thought-Liberations in
Contemporary China, Beijing: Contemporary China Press (in Chinese).
Morck, R. and F. Yang (2010), ‘The Shanxi banks’, Working Paper 15884, NBER Working
Paper Series, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Nathan, A.J. (1986), Chinese Democracy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press.
Nathan, A.J. (2003), ‘Authoritarian resilience’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (1), 6–17.
Naughton, B. (2007), The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Nee, V. and S. Opper (2012), Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in
China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ngok, K. and G. Zhu (2007), ‘Marketisation, globalisation and administrative reform in
China: a zigzag road to a promising future’, International Review of Administrative Science,
73 (2), 217–33.
Nitsch, M. and F. Diebel (2007), ‘Guanxi economics: Confucius meets Lenin, Keynes, and
Schumpeter in contemporary China’, RAP Rio Jeneiro, 31, 959–92.
Nonaka, I. and Z. Zhu (2012), Pragmatic Strategy: Eastern Wisdom, Global Success,
North, D.C. (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge:
Perry, E.J. (2001), ‘Challenging the mandate of heaven: popular protest in modern China’,
Critical Asian Studies, 33 (2), 163–80.
Pye, L.W. (1988), The Mandarin and the Cadre: China’s Political Cultures, Ann Arbor, MI:
Centre for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan.
Redding, G. (2002), ‘The capitalist business system of China and its rationale’, Asia Pacific
Journal of Management, 19, 221–49.
Redding, G. and M.A. Witt (2007), The Future of Chinese Capitalism: Choices and Chances,
Rowe, W. (1983), ‘Hu Lin-i’s reform of the grain tribute system in Hupeh, 1955–1858’,
Ch’ing-shi wen-t’i (Issues of Qing History), 4 (10), 33–86.
Shambaugh, D. (2008), China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Sigley, G. (2006), ‘Chinese governmentalities: government, governance and the socialist
market economy’, Economy and Society, 35 (4), 487–508.
Tan, S.-H. (2011), ‘The Tao of politics: Li (rituals/rites) and laws as pragmatic tools of gov-
ernment’, Philosophy East and West, 61 (3), 468–91.
The Times (2013), ‘China’s banks put the rest in the shade’, 1 July, p. 38.
Tipton, F.B. (2007), Asian Firms: History, Institutions and Management, Cheltenham, UK
and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Wang, S. (2003), ‘The problem of state weakness’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (1), 37–42.

World Bank (2012), China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income
Society, Washington, DC: World Bank.
Wu, J. (2010), Understanding and Interpreting China’s Economic Reform, Shanghai: Far East
Publishers (in Chinese).
Wu, X. (2013), The Gains and Lost of Economic Reforms in China’s History, Hangzhou:
Zhejiang University Press (in Chinese).
Xue, L. and K. Zhong (2012), ‘Domestic reform and global integrations: public administra-
tion reform in China over the last 30 years’, International Review of Administrative Science,
78 (2), 284–304.
Yang, K. (2007), ‘China’s 1998 administrative reform and new public management: applying
a comparative framework’, International Journal of Public Administration, 30, 1371–92.
Yep, R. (2004), ‘Can “tax-for-fee” reform reduce rural tension in China? The process, pro-
gress and limitations’, China Quarterly, 177 (March), 42–70.
Zhang, K (1996), ‘Establishing a socialist market economy requires strong government’,
Chinese Administration and Management, 2, 17–23 (in Chinese).
Zhang, M. (2009), ‘Crossing the river by touching stones: a comparative study of administra-
tive reforms in China and the United States’, Public Administration Review, 70 (Special
Issue), 582–7.
Zhong, Y. (2003), Local Government and Politics in China: Challenges from Below, New
York: M.E. Sharpe.
Zhou, K.X. (1996), How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, Oxford: Westview
Press.
Zhu, Z. (2007), ‘Reform without a theory: why does it work in China?’ Organisation Studies,
28, 1503–22.
Zhu, Z. (2008), ‘Who created China’s household farms and township-village enterprises: the
conscious few or the ignorant many?’, in G.T. Solomon (ed.), Academy of Management
Annual Meeting Best Paper Proceedings, Washington, DC: George Washington University.

14. Capacity, complexity and
public sector reform in Australia
John Halligan
INTRODUCTION
Developing government capacity to address complex and intractable

problems has become increasingly a priority for Australian central gov-
ernment. The propensity to address complex capacity questions depends
on the extent to which governments engage directly in institutional design
and support its successful implementation. A public service system con-
sists of different types of capacity, which may be utilized depending on
government goals. Capacity for complex issues is a more specialized
matter because it generally involves multiple actors and cross-boundary
arrangements.
Capacity and reform are directly related, as invariably a major reform
agenda encompasses capacity elements. However, different emphases have
been accorded to capacity in reform agendas. In order to explore the emer-
gent options, two narratives are identified. The first follows the trajectory
of public sector reforms, and is both state-centric and inclined towards
greater collaboration, even though the results have been underwhelming.
A neoliberal narrative envisages a smaller role for government and greater
reliance on third parties, and will dominate the immediate future.
The chapter examines several types and elements of capacity and how
they relate to reform. A range of instruments is employed for basic coor-
dination and collaboration to address complex problems. Narratives of
reform suggest different ways of handling the design of the public service,
with significant implication for capacity and complexity.
CAPACITY AND REFORM
Capacity is essentially the ability to organize and manage resources for

making and implementing decisions, and has several elements: strategic
focus and direction; system steering and integration; and capability (e.g.
provision of expert staff and the means for implementation). Policy capac-
ity can be seen as marshalling the appropriate resources to make decisions
323

about strategic directions for allocating public resources, whereas admin-

istrative capacity addresses human and physical resources needed for
delivering government outputs (Painter and Pierre 2005).
Capacity pertains to public organizations, public service systems and
external relationships with third parties. The obvious agencies to both
lead reform and to respond to complexity issues are those at the centre
of government with responsibilities for policy, finance and human capital
across the public service. At this system of macro-level frameworks, guide-
lines and cross-boundary leadership are important, including the overall
capability of public officials. Under the Australian devolved system the
department is highly important within portfolios, and interaction occurs
within policy fields, and involves different forms of relationships and
networks both inside the Australian public service (APS) and externally
(Edwards et al. 2012).
Four variations on capacity can be distinguished, involving different
aptitudes, and are employed for different purposes. For analytical pur-
poses they are basically mutually exclusive, although in practice they may
be used in combination. They vary according to whether capacity is being
sought by strengthening the internal system or by an external-centred
approach that relies on levering off third parties.
A focus on internal capacity essentially addresses management
improvement and strengthening staff capability. A second approach
concentrates on steering and features machinery of government, and
particularly central agencies, departments of state and effectiveness
questions. An external approach seeks to reduce dependence on internal
capacity either by relying on external expertise through substituting
third parties or relinquishing responsibilities outright, with efficiency
objectives being prominent. A fourth approach, collaboration, involves
inter-agency and inter-sector arrangements that enlarge and improve
capacity.
Basic roles for supporting a reform agenda have been identified as
system capacity, and capability and culture, as well as strategic direc-
tion and systemic performance. Fundamental failures in major reform
of a public service system derive from the lack of sophisticated strategic
focus and investment in capacity and cultural change, and the necessary
management of system performance (Barber 2007: 337, 339).
AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT
Australian central government operates within a federal system where

the main service delivery occurs at the state and territory level. This has

325
Capacity, complexity and public sector reform in Australia
major implications for how capacity is organized because of the mixture of

autonomy (the state operates its own systems) and interdependence (most
revenue flows through the Commonwealth). The national system remains
a two-track one, with the state government accounting for the bulk of
the expenditure, particularly in the major sectors (apart from defence),
while the federal government combines national policy, some delivery and
transfers.
Australia is one of the anglophone countries with an administrative tra-
dition that readily adapted to a public management approach. The distinc-
tiveness of the anglophone administrative tradition was reaffirmed during
the reform era beginning in the 1980s, when Australia adhered more to
precepts of new public management (NPM) than other OECD countries
(OECD 1995; Pal 2012). The emergence of this distinctive set of reforms
was facilitated by instrumentalism and pragmatism, which are features of
this administrative tradition. It also reflected patterns of interaction that
accorded legitimacy and relevance to initiatives within the group (Halligan
2010). Endogenous communication patterns have been influential through
networks based on relationships developed between Britain and its former
colonies, which have included staff exchanges and regular meetings of net-
works. The specialized networks are a prime source for the circulation of
ideas and documentation of experience. For Australia, the long-standing
relationship with the UK, which continues to furnish its head of state, is
the most important source of reform ideas. Policy transfers may produce
convergence of public sector reforms and isomorphism within the group,
although the pattern is inconsistent and contextual factors usually inter-
vene (Halligan 2013; Pollitt 2013). A recent example is the UK’s system
for capability review, which was adopted in a modified form by Australia
(and New Zealand).
The latest Australian reform process was unusual in that it occurred
amidst the international financial crisis, but was not essentially a product
of it. The impact of the fiscal crisis on the Australian public sector was
less than for other OECD countries, but was still highly significant for the
budget. At the national level the consequences for dimensions of govern-
ance (central steering, leadership and capacity) and the evolution of public
management were more far-reaching. The medium effect of Australia’s
superior trading position affected the private sector, lowered govern-
ment revenue and guaranteed deficits for the foreseeable future. Under a
government committed to reducing the role of the state while confront-
ing budget issues, there are major implications for capacity to address
complex problems.

Capacity in Reform
The Australian trajectory can be summarized with reference to phases

of reform. Managerialism (Halligan 2007) best reflects the first phase in
which management became the central concept and reshaped thinking as
part of a paradigm change. This was succeeded by a phase that for a time
came close to the mainstream depiction of new public management (NPM)
(Hood 1991), in which the market element was favoured and features such
as disaggregation, privatization and a private sector focus were at the
forefront. Variations on state-centric governance became apparent in the
2000s through the renewed focus on modes of coordinating and control
that were designed to confer greater coherence and central capacity on the
public sector (Halligan 2006).
Management capacity
The initial period of reform in the 1980s, managerialism, displaced tradi-
tional administration with a package of reforms based on management
and an emphasis on results rather than inputs and processes (Halligan and
Power 1992). The main elements of the reform program focused on the
capacity of the core public service (including the senior public service), new
forms of management (e.g. financial), decentralization, commercialization
and corporatization. The focus on results, outcomes and performance-
oriented management dates from this time, although the emphasis was on
program budgeting and management. There was also a major reorganiza-
tion of the machinery of government that produced mega-departments in
order to improve capacity.
Externalizing capacity
A strong commitment to neoliberal economic reforms in the 1990s led
the public service to become highly decentralized, marketized, contrac-
tualized and privatized. The new agenda was centred on competition and
contestability, outsourcing, client focus, core business, and applying the
purchaser/provider principle. The private sector and market forces were
closely related: the exporting of responsibilities to the private sector and/
or making the public sector subject to market disciplines; and the import-
ing of business techniques combined with attempts to replicate market
conditions internally. The agenda also covered a deregulated personnel
system; a core public service focused on policy, contestability of the deliv-
ery of services with greater use of the private sector, and a new financial
management framework that included outputs and outcomes report-
ing, and extended agency devolution to budget estimates and financial
management.

327
Reducing central capacity

The devolution of responsibilities from central agencies to line depart-
ments and agencies was highly significant in the late 1990s, with a dimin-
ished role for central agencies being one consequence (Halligan 2006).
The Public Service Commission’s role was modest, while the Department
of the Prime Minister and Cabinet interventions were constrained and
were no longer providing overall public service leadership. The role of the
Department of Finance also contracted substantially. The ascendancy of
neoliberal reforms and NPM reached its apogee.
Strengthening internal capacity

A change in trajectory emerged in the 2000s, with an emphasis on state-
centric and integrating governance, which had an impact on relationships
within, and the coherence of, the public service, delivery and implementa-
tion, and performance and responsiveness to government policy. Four
dimensions were important: resurrection of the central agency as a major
actor with more direct influence over departments; whole of government
as the stronger expression of a range of forms of coordination; central
monitoring of agency implementation and delivery; and departmentaliza-
tion through absorbing statutory authorities and rationalizing the non-
departmental sector (Halligan 2006).
An underlying element was control: the use of programs to improve
financial information for ministers; greater emphasis on strategic coor-
dination by cabinet; controlling major policy agendas; the abolition
of agencies and bodies as part of rationalization and integration; and
monitoring the delivery and implementation of government policy. These
measures increased the potential for policy and program control and
integration using the conventional machinery of cabinet, central agencies
and departments, as well as other coordinating instruments. The intensity
of the Australian reassertion of the centre and the ministerial department
resulted from both system shortcomings and environmental uncertainty
and threat favouring the stronger centre. Underlying change was a state-
centric focus on sorting out the architecture and processes of the system to
provide for more effective government.
Refining internal and third-party capacity

A major reform agenda was instigated in 2010 with a new ‘blueprint’ plus a
supplementary agenda on financial accountability. They represented both
responses to capacity issues that emerged in the wake of previous reform,
particularly in the late 1990s, and a basis for moving the overall agenda
forward. Both have strong capacity elements. The review, Ahead of the
Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration,

raised significant questions about coordination and governance of agen-

cies. The actual diagnosis suggested lack of capacity and account-
ability, performance weaknesses, and creeping bureaucratization and
compliance issues (AGRAGA 2010). The other significant inquiry, the
Commonwealth Financial Accountability Review (DFD 2012a), ranged
widely over financial and related matters, including governance. The
imperative for greater attention to capacity and capability weaknesses was
underscored, and the rhetoric intensified about the need for collaborative
governance with third parties.
Components of Capacity
Central agencies
Of the anglophone countries, Australia has emphasized a strong prime
minister’s department and enhancing the resources of the political execu-
tive. Although several models have been evident during the reform era
(Halligan 2011), the long- term trend has been towards strengthening
central steering to cope with greater complexity, but how effectively that
potentiality is utilized depends on the political leadership.
As the key organizations in this realm, the central agencies have as their
mandate whole-of-government and systemic responsibilities that cross
the public service: the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for
policy, the Treasury for economic policy, the Department of Finance and
Deregulation for financial management, and the Australian Public Service
Commission (APSC) on human capital. Each has distinctive and com-
plementary roles and is presided over by the source of power and policy
direction in the machinery of government, the Department of the Prime
Minister and Cabinet, although the Prime Minister’s Office has assumed
greater significance.
A strong central drive with implications for capacity has been based on
the concept of ‘One APS’ to counter the devolution of responsibilities to
departmental secretaries and to propagate the APS values. This devolu-
tion of responsibilities to line departments after 1999 had the effect of
‘balkanizing’ the APS as different conditions of service became prevalent
and the identity of an employee’s department was more important than
their identification with the public service (AGRAGA 2010).
With this corrosion of system identity, ‘One APS’ resurfaced as a cen-
trepiece for reconstructing consciousness and identity at the APS level
(MAC 2005), and via the reform blueprint (AGRAGA 2010). The ques-
tion of public service coherence and consolidation was strongly expressed
through the mantra of ‘One APS’. The lament across the service – the
reasons differing between location and level – was of the limitations of a

329
devolved agency structure. Chief executives and departmental secretaries

had control over conditions of employment, which produced substantial
variations in salary packages. The then head of the public service, Terry
Moran (2009), asserted that there was ‘one-APS, and . . . we need to bring
more meaning to that statement. The APS is not a collection of separate
institutions. It is a mutually reinforcing and cohesive whole.’ The mobility
of APS officers needed to be enhanced to enable movement across depart-
ments without loss of pay or conditions. This position was endorsed by the
reform review through a recommendation to clarify and align employment
conditions. This also informed the recommendation that departmental
secretaries needed support from a unified APS-wide leadership group
(AGRAGA 2010: 22).
A related dimension focused on collective action in pursuit of the
reform agenda. The Ahead of the Game report identified a need to enhance
leadership, talent management, and learning and development across the
Australian public service (AGRAGA 2010). The responsibilities of the
APSC in the reform process were strengthened and repositioned to take a
leadership role for the APS and, as a central agency, engage in the provi-
sion of ‘expertise, guidance, performance monitoring and some centralized
services to agencies’. This would entail developing options for a common
approach that included leadership and learning and development, with
responsibilities including work-level standards, employment conditions
and greater consistency across the APS (AGRAGA 2010: x). The APSC
has worked to achieve greater commonality in terms and conditions across
agencies, and to reduce disparities in order to facilitate mobility across the
APS. The Commission oversaw the department bargaining of enterprise
agreements to ensure consistency, which would also increase commonality
of terms and conditions across the APS (APSC 2012: 14–15).
In addition, the Secretaries Board (comprising heads of departments)
has been exercising the responsibility of stewardship with regard to the
need to increase capacity and One APS (APSC 2012: 7). Central agencies
have risen in significance, with stronger central roles and responsibilities
for standards and guidelines. There is greater emphasis on collaboration
with line departments. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
has shifted its approach to working with departments on projects. Finance
has also been exploring more sympathetic approaches, and conducted a
highly consultative review of financial management accountability (DFD
2012b).
Departments of state: systemic coordination (at the macro level)

In the architecture of public organization, a significant trend has been the
swing back to a more comprehensive ministerial department (Halligan

2006). This agenda for enhancing the department was given formal rec-
ognition through a review of corporate governance. The solution was to
force all non-departmental agencies to operate according to one of two
templates, a board model or a non-board structure. Ministerial depart-
ments acquired more direct control over public agencies in part to deal
with the extent of non-departmental organizations, and questions about
their governance. The emphasis on the department was expressed through
rationalizing statutory authorities and extending control of agencies with
hybrid boards that failed corporate governance prescriptions. The long-
term result was a reduction in the number of agencies in the outer public
sector (114 to 85 between 2003 and 2013) and an expansion in the number
in the core public service (84 to 103).
The drive for the ministerial department was exemplified by the demise
of Centrelink (see below). The largest department outside Defence was the
Department of Social Security, a monolithic and functionally integrated
organization that combined policy and implementation. In 1996, a new
type of service delivery agency was created based on delivering services
that accounted for about 30 per cent of Commonwealth expenditure. The
Centrelink concept was of an agency that would merge the two networks
for social security and unemployment acquired from departments that
became its two major clients. Centrelink’s mandate became that of a
one-stop shop delivery agency providing services to purchasing depart-
ments (Halligan 2008). Centrelink was subsequently subsumed within a
new parent department, the Department of Human Services, created to
improve service delivery for six agencies. Centrelink was subsequently
formally integrated within the department. The natural tendency of the
Commonwealth has been to focus on the ministerial department, and this
is entrenched as the default position. Accordingly, the cycle moved over
15 years from integrated department to multipurpose delivery agency
to an integrated department. The circular process was complete in 2011
when Centrelink’s absorption meant that it was reduced to a badge for
customers.
Questions have also been raised about capability at the department and
agency level. There are now systematic assessments from 17 departments’
capability reviews, each based on an independent review panel of former
senior public servants and consultants with a rating system that combined
traffic lights and back-up judgements.1 One of the most significant capa-
bility and performance gaps for the senior executive service (SES) and the
SES feeder group was people management (AGRAGA 2010: 53). Also,
surveys of employees have indicated low satisfaction with senior leaders as
a continuing trend (JCPAA 2012: 14–15).
From the Australian capability review program of departments, the

331
results across dimensions of leadership, strategy and delivery provide

insights into strengths and weaknesses. For leadership, 76 per cent of
agencies were ‘well placed’ (or better) in terms of motivating people, but
71 per cent were ranked as a development area (or worse) for develop-
ing people. These and other results indicated considerable variations in
departmental assessments. The category ‘staff performance management’
ranked poorly in the assessments, with three-quarters of reviews rating
agencies below the required level (APSC 2013: 215).
A significant clarification of the departmental secretary’s role was the
introduction of the stewardship function. According to the blueprint for
reform (AGRAGA 2010), APS-wide stewardship was a core role of the
secretary, and one that was ‘discharged in partnership with other secretar-
ies and the APS Commissioner’. Politicians’ lack of strategic focus and
‘short-termism’ indicated that an alternative was needed to relying heavily
on political direction. The stewardship role was designed for the public
service to have ‘the capacity to serve successive governments. A steward-
ship capability must exist regardless of the style of any one Minister or
government.’ Stewardship covered ‘financial sustainability’ and efficient
resource management, as well as ‘less tangible factors such as maintain-
ing the trust placed in the APS and building a culture of innovation and
integrity in policy advice’ (AGRAGA 2010: 5).
Vertical and horizontal: Inter-agency: Horizontal management

The Australian system displays tensions between the strength of vertical
accountability on the one hand, and the increasing scale of existing hori-
zontal relationships on the other. Departments and FMA agencies have
continued to have
traditional structures with an emphasis on clear organisational boundaries

and vertical hierarchical accountability. While it establishes some overarching
whole-of-government principles, the current framework has a strong-willed
focus on the operations of individual entities. The roles and responsibilities of
chief executives . . . relate to the particular entities they are appointed to run,
and do not directly consider concepts such as joint operations. (DFD 2012a: 36)
Nevertheless, views continue to be expressed that support horizon-

tal approaches, collaboration and collective action, in particular by
the major reform report Ahead of the Game (AGRAGA 2010), whose
recommendations were endorsed by the government.
Independently of this impetus at the centre, a continuing momentum
towards cooperation and coordination has been apparent, particularly
as agencies sought solutions to delivery problems. There are over 1800
inter-agency agreements for 21 departments (i.e. all departments of state,

plus two large agencies), ‘signifying a breadth of cross agency activity and
interdependencies’ (ANAO 2010: 30). Of the 1800 cross-agency agree-
ments in Australia, three types of services were provided by one agency for
another. The first type was delivery services to the public (e.g. on behalf
of a policy department, best exemplified by Centrelink). Second, there
was provision of advice or data to another department (e.g. data collec-
tion and provision; expert advice to Murray–Darling Basin Authority).
Third, there were shared services between two agencies (e.g. the provision
of corporate services by one department to another; ICT services provided
by DFAT to other agencies’ overseas posts) (adapted from ANAO 2010:
Table 1.1).
Then there were relationships that are of more relevance here: joint
program implementation (e.g. shared oversight for delivering interna-
tional climate change adaptation initiatives); and border security support
(e.g. national security coordination between agencies whose roles are
interdependent or complementary, such as border security functions by
customs and DAFF) (ANAO 2010). Only one of the governance agree-
ments (which take various forms, including memoranda of understand-
ing, and service level and partnership agreements) is obviously closer
to collaboration; the ‘collaborative head agreement’ defines ‘high-level
principles and obligations for a collaborative relationship between two
or more agencies’ (ANAO 2010: Table 2.1). For the purpose here, the
survey of types of agreements does not go far enough in terms of speci-
fication of the collaborative relationships focused on accountability and
outcomes. There is a shortage of evidence about the incidence and types of
collaboration and what cases contribute in practice.
Capacity through collaboration and shared outcomes

Collaboration has been in vogue for some time but the term has been
employed loosely and aspirationally by practitioners, and the results
are modest (O’Flynn 2007). An incipient approach to sharing outcomes
emerged from the review of Australian government administration
(AGRAGA 2010), which recommended the introduction of shared
outcomes across portfolios focusing on priority areas. Several elements
were proposed for establishing shared outcomes involving the alloca-
tion of roles and responsibilities across portfolios based on high-level
inter-
agency agreements; and a transition process for moving from
output structures to shared outcomes. Accountability for achieving
shared outcomes would be through budget reporting against the out-
comes, and monitoring by the Department of the Prime Minister and
Cabinet’s Cabinet Implementation Unit (AGRAGA 2010). However, it
was unclear whether accountabilities and risks were also to be shared,

333
and through what mechanisms. These issues needed attention if align-

ment were to occur between collaboration, accountability and shared
governance (Edwards et al. 2012: 235).
The sharing of outcomes in horizontal arrangements is handled in
several ways. The standard set of distinctions between communication,
cooperation, coordination and collaboration has been used for types of
sharing, each successively denoting an elaboration of the relationship.
Such a developmental perspective can also be represented by a range of
informal and formal collaborative mechanisms and other characteristics
of the relationship (ANAO 2007: 49). There are important distinctions
between relationships where tasks are performed by one agency on
behalf of another, and the application of what ANAO terms ‘whole-of-
government’, which represents a significant step up (ANAO 2007: 48,
49). In confronting the question of sharing accountability and outcomes,
the assumption is made that partners are involved as peers and that the
focus is on outcomes. Shared accountability can be conceived of as the
arrangements for specifying responsibilities and accountabilities within
a collaboration based on a formal partnership. If a whole-of-government
approach is envisaged, it is ‘broader, involving collaboration at multiple
levels, shared outcomes and a culture that values government priorities
over those of a single department’ (ibid.: 48–9).
The Department of Finance and Deregulation recognized the need for
dual and multiple accountabilities, and for legislation that accommodates
collective responsibility and multi-party accountabilities (DFD 2012b:
26). Partnering arrangements that involve individuals or organizations
working towards shared objectives were advocated where the arrange-
ments were among equals and entailed shared accountability. In contrast
to standard contractual arrangements, partners have collective respon-
sibility and each partner would have several accountability obligations,
both horizontal and vertical (DFD 2012b: 26–7).2
The subsequent legislation, Public Governance, Performance and
Accountability, has been critiqued for dealing with collective responsibil-
ity and multiple accountabilities in a limited manner (ANAO 2013b: 8).
The cautious legislative approach was regarded as failing to be ambitious
and was therefore a missed opportunity.
A comprehensive system of shared accountability for system- wide
results would require a recasting of aspects of governance as we know it.
Without fundamental change, a durable systemic focus on shared results
and accountability is unlikely. The main consideration is of course to
institutionalize within governments principles and practices that provide
for shared accountability based on outcomes. Within that framework,3
different types of partnership can operate, providing of course that they

are reflected at the political level and through parliamentary reporting and
accountability.
There is therefore some evidence of movement towards collaboration,
and some institutionalization, but this has yet to be capitalized on in terms
of systemic action. In order to look more closely at incipient collaboration,
three recent cases provide an illustration of processes in train and yet to
be realized.
The first case, Project Wickenby, is a cross-agency exercise that has
been depicted as providing a model for future taskforce projects (ANAO
2012a; DFD 2012a). It was established in 2006 as a cross-agency taskforce
‘to protect the integrity of Australia’s financial and regulatory systems
by preventing people from promoting or participating in illegal offshore
schemes’ (ANAO 2012a: 10). Tax evasion crosses the boundaries of the
responsibilities of many government agencies. Rather than individual
agencies being responsible for key project tasks, the focus has been on
enabling agencies to work together to achieve project outcomes. A joint
taskforce was regarded as more likely to produce results, as more effective
use could be made of agency expertise and capacities. Project governance
and assurance processes and structures were designed by the taskforce to
enhance collaboration and joint decision-making, and their formalization
shaped the taskforce approach. Each agency also has its own agency-
specific framework for delivering taskforce outputs. The Australian
Taxation Office (ATO) is the lead agency for the project, and responsible
for handling governance and assurance arrangements for the eight agen-
cies.4 The taskforce’s work includes civil audits and risk reviews, criminal
investigations, prosecutions and other legal action (ANAO 2012a: 92).
The second case is about coordinating whole-of-government arrange-
ments for Indigenous services and programs. A major government com-
mitment is to ‘close the gap’ in Indigenous disadvantage. The case shows
the role of the Department of Families, Housing, Community Service
and Indigenous Affairs operating within a coordination framework when
the broader environment of ideas and practice has moved towards
collaboration.5
The delivery of programs and services to Indigenous people involves
complex networks and several thousand funding agreements, and requires
‘an unprecedented level of cooperation and coordination . . . to integrate
and improve service delivery for Indigenous people as well as the need for
collaboration between and within Governments at all levels, their agencies
and funded service providers’. Since multiple agencies have been involved
in policy and delivery, an explicit lead-agency role was needed to ensure
information was shared ‘across agencies, to coordinate service delivery on
the ground, to provide consolidated advice to Government and to address

335
any systemic issues in a timely manner’ (ANAO 2012b: 44). The enun-
ciation of collaboration did not ensure that practice conformed where
politics was involved. The department agreed to move from an approach
centred on sharing information (coordination) towards one that drives
whole-of-government, innovative policy development and service deliv-
ery; and involves collaboration, greater integration, and accountability
that addresses outcomes (ANAO 2012b: 29, 45).
The third case involves the employment program, Working Age
Payments, which covers income support delivered through a partner-
ship between Department of Education, Employment and Workplace
Relations (DEEWR) and the Department of Human Services (DHS). In
2012–13, DHS delivered an estimated $19.8 billion of payments for pro-
grams administered by DEEWR (ANAO 2013a: 1–2). What is described
as a partnership between DEEWR and DHS has been supported by a
formal agreement. Cross-agency agreements are an important mechanism
for supporting collaboration and coordination between agencies, where
they provide a framework for governance and operations by establishing
individual and joint roles and responsibilities; outlining agreed struc-
tures and processes; and providing for transparency and accountability
of administration and outcomes. DEEWR has had several cross-agency
agreements since 1998 for the delivery of employment programs. In
2009, DEEWR and Centrelink entered into a partnership arrangement,
which replaced the previous purchaser–provider arrangement between
the agencies and provides for direct appropriation by the Department of
Human Service of most funding of service delivery (ANAO 2013a: 13).
The partnership approach means that departments must ‘negotiate and
agree service delivery strategies that meet the intended outcomes of the
BMA and acknowledge each department’s operational priorities’. In order
to realize a more collaborative approach, DEEWR and DHS resolved to
apply agreed outcomes and work practices on a consistent basis (ANAO
2013a: 15–16).
TWO REFORM NARRATIVES
Two reform narratives are distinguished. The public service reform nar-
rative has a lineage that encompasses a series of reform documents and
agendas across 40 years. It is essentially a state-centric perspective that
perceives change in terms of modifications to the existing public service
system. Given this is one of the anglophone countries closely associ-
ated with public management reform, the changes may be substantial
(Halligan 2007). In terms of capacity, they emphasize the internal and

steering approaches, which in recent times can be traced to joined-up and

whole-of-government responses.
Picking up the development of the narrative more recently, the most
significant, and typical, event was the review of the Australian govern-
ment administration, discussed earlier (AGRAGA 2010). The report’s
recommendations covered leadership and strategic direction, and public
sector workforce capability with reform areas including a strengthened
APSC for driving change, strategic planning and expectations for agencies
(agility, capability, effectiveness and efficiency). Specific recommenda-
tions addressed the roles and responsibilities of secretaries, strengthening
leadership and assessing the senior executive service. They also reflected
the emerging importance of collaborative relations internally, as well as
with other levels of government and non-governmental actors.
Ahead of the Game gives the idea of collaborative governance a pos-
sible foundation in public governance. At the very least, collaborative
governance requires wider societal accountability, shared intra-and inter-
governmental governance accountabilities, and participatory governance
(Edwards et al. 2012).
In Australia, as elsewhere, the question of articulating the future public
service has been problematic. In this case the lack of a distinctive and unify-
ing core issue or theme added to the mixed acceptance of the reform agenda
overall within and beyond the public service. Without an ‘urgent, politically
“hot” reform trigger, the Moran group clearly found it difficult to weave
a coherent narrative that holds the disparate activity clusters together’
(’t Hart 2010). Nevertheless, the agendas derived from Ahead of the Game
were pursued, and official claims were subsequently made that the recom-
mendations were either implemented or in progress (JCPAA 2012).
The continuing expressions of the narrative have come from two former
heads of the public service, Terry Moran (2013) and Peter Shergold (2013).
One is grounded in the needs of public service, while advocating greater
devolution and some external (community) engagement. The other seeks
to redefine the public service role in terms of oversight of third-party
activity.
The architect of Ahead of the Game, Moran (2013), envisages the APS
as being
on the threshold of the next stage of public sector reforms . . . The real
benefit is that they have the potential to unlock a range of outcomes, similar
in scale to the benefits that flowed from the economic reforms of the 1980s
and 1990s.
The groundwork for reform was laid by Ahead of the Game, but a broader
framework was required to support and direct reform (Moran 2013: 1).

337
Five major reform directions provide the basis for this framework: stra-
tegic direction setting (in particular long-term strategy, joining up service
delivery, consolidation); reforming government structures (intergovern-
mental roles and relationships and localization); rationalizing public
administration (core business of levels of government, smaller agencies);
improving accountability processes of department heads, agencies and
ministerial advisers; and increasing organizational readiness (improving
internal capacity of the public service, public sector management, staffing
and skills).
The variation on this narrative locates the public service more explicitly
within a broader governance framework. Shergold’s conception of part-
nering also envisages a strong public service, but one with redefined roles
where it comes to dealing with delivery and external relationships. His
position is clearly differentiated from Moran’s:
public administration . . . is becoming harder. The complexities of public policy
are becoming progressively more ‘wicked’ . . . To tackle more effectively these
and similar conundrums requires a different type of public service, not just an
improved version of what already exists. (Shergold 2013: 8)
Five of his six elements of reform are externally focused: a market for
delivering public goods; delivery through third parties; empowering
experience; co-production of public services; and reinvigorating demo-
cratic engagement. (The sixth envisages sharing the development of
public policy through increased competition, particularly with political
advisers – Shergold 2013: 10).
The origins of the neoliberal narrative are international and date from
the rise of conviction politicians in the UK and the USA and associated
economic philosophy in the 1980s (Pollitt 1990). The ideas also have a con-
siderable lineage in Australia and with elements that cross political parties,
but the most complete position was taken by the first Coalition govern-
ment to take office in the reform era. It was articulated most explicitly
under the Howard government and in particular through its Commission
of Audit (1996), elements of which have been reproduced by a successor
Commission of Audit in 2013–14 under another Coalition government.
The Commission of Audit has been resurrected by the Abbott govern-
ment, with reporting to occur in 2014. The National Commission of Audit’s
terms of reference cover, inter alia, scope of government (current split of
roles and responsibilities between the levels of government and whether
continuing a Commonwealth activity can be justified). A second element,
efficiency and effectiveness of government expenditure, covers options
for greater efficiencies, such as: contestability of services, technologies
and service delivery; consolidation of agencies and boards and support

functions; flattening organizational structures and streamlining lines of

responsibility and accountability; and asset privatization. Other elements
are the adequacy of budget controls and disciplines, Commonwealth
infrastructure and public sector performance and accountability (NCA
2013). These were similar to those of the 1996 audit.
Both narratives involve reducing central government. Of the two, public
service reform directly engages with complexity and intractable problems.
The two variations either anticipate greater collaboration and/or devolu-
tion. However, it has yet to be convincingly applied in practice, despite
opportunities. In contrast, the neoliberal narrative focuses primarily on
questions about the scope and roles of government, expenditure matters
(e.g. contestability and privatization) and performance. It does not directly
address capacity questions except in so far as pressures on capacity may be
relieved by transferring responsibilities to the private sector. The narrative
is closely associated with the current government and will dominate both
reform and capacity for the short to medium term.
The capacity is inherent in the machinery, but this is dependent on how
it is used for steering and engagement. The medium-term future is budget
driven, combined with neoliberal agendas (which will be clearer once the
Commission of Audit has reported and the government has responded in
2014). The impact on capacity is expected to be threefold: heavy reduc-
tion of public service staff; movement of some capacity outside the public
sector; and greater use of third sector organizations. There is already one
exception, with Indigenous management and delivery being integrated
under the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and further
capacity development is possible where it is efficiency-based, the precedent
being Centrelink (discussed earlier, which entailed efficiency through the
merger of two delivery networks). It is unclear whether other forms of
integration, such as back office management and IT, have much to offer
the handling of complexity.
CONCLUSION
Australian public sector reform has invariably addressed questions of

capacity, and has a range of instruments that can be deployed. Increasingly
the emphasis has shifted towards collaboration because the need for effec-
tive inter-agency, inter-sectoral and inter-jurisdictional initiatives is well
established. Despite the existence of a range of intractable problems that
require decentralized and cross-boundary solutions and interfacing with
non-government actors, the arrangements for sharing responsibilities
remain underdeveloped. The preconditions for a greater commitment to

339
collaboration appear to be undermined by the prevailing focus on the

budget deficit and reconfiguring the capacity and role of government.
NOTES
1. The main sources are the APSC, http://www.apsc.gov.au/aps-reform/current-projects/
capability-reviews and APSC (2013); there were 17 Australian reports at the end.
2. Joint ventures were also supported for a range of circumstances, including the use of a
responsible lead agency, and interdepartmental committees or taskforce working on a
complex issue. There is a need to recognize a range of options for structures that facili-
tated greater collaboration and collective responsibility (DFD 2012b: 27).
3. The DFD paper (2012a: 37–9) indicates a range of ways in which the rigidities of the current
Australian appropriations can be modified to accommodate collaborative approaches.
4. The other main agencies are: Australian Crime Commission, Australian Federal Police,
Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Commonwealth Director of Public
Prosecutions (Attorney-General’s Department).
5. Collaboration entails agencies sharing risks, responsibilities and rewards, whereas coor-
dination focuses on sharing information and agencies that adjust activities in response to
interaction (ANAO 2012a: 59).
REFERENCES
AGRAGA (Advisory Group on the Reform of Australian Government Administration)

(2010) Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government
Administration, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2007) Whole of Government Indigenous Service
Delivery Arrangements, Audit Report No. 10, Canberra: ANAO.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2010) Effective Cross-Agency Agreements, Audit
Report No. 41, Canberra: ANAO.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2012a) Administration of Project Wickenby,
Audit Report No. 25, Canberra: ANAO.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2012b) Australian Government Coordination
Arrangements for Indigenous Programs: Department of Families, Housing, Community
Service and Indigenous Affairs, Audit Report No. 8, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2013a) Cross-Agency Coordination of Employment
Programs: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace relations, Department of
Human Service, Audit Report No. 45, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2013b) Submission 008 to Joint Committee of
Public Accounts and Audit, 43rd Parliament: Report 438: Advisory Report on the Public
Governance, Performance and Accountability Bill, Canberra: House of Representatives,
Parliament of Australia.
APSC (Australian Public Service Commission) (2012) State of the Service Report 2011–12,
Canberra: APSC.
APSC (Australian Public Service Commission) (2013) State of the Service Report 2012–13,
Canberra: APSC.
Barber, M. (2007) Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of
Achieving Targets, London: Politico’s.
DFD (Department of Finance and Deregulation) (2012a) Is less more? Towards better
Commonwealth performance, Commonwealth Financial Accountability Review
Discussion Paper, Canberra.

DFD (Department of Finance and Deregulation) (2012b) Sharpening the focus: a framework
for improving Commonwealth performance, Commonwealth Financial Accountability
Review Position Paper, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
Edwards, M., J. Halligan, B. Horrigan and G. Nicoll (2012) Public Sector Governance in
Australia, Canberra: ANU Press.
Halligan, J. (2006) ‘The reassertion of the centre in a first generation NPM system’, in Tom
Christensen and Per Lægreid (eds), Autonomy and Regulation: Coping with Agencies in the
Modern State, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing,
pp. 162–80.
Halligan, J. (2007) ‘Reintegrating government in third generation reforms of Australia and
New Zealand’, Public Policy and Administration, 22(2), 217–38.
Halligan, J. (2008) The Centrelink Experiment: Innovation in Service Delivery, Canberra:
ANU Press.
Halligan, J. (2010) ‘The fate of administrative tradition in anglophone countries during the
reform era’, in M. Painter and B.G. Peters (eds), Tradition and Public Administration,
Halligan, J. (2011) ‘Central steering in Australia’ in C. Dahlström, B.G. Peters and J. Pierre
(eds), Steering from the Centre: Strengthening Political Control in Western Democracies,
University of Toronto Press, pp. 99–122.
Halligan, J. (2013) ‘The role and significance of context in comparing country systems’, in
C. Pollitt (ed.), Context in Public Policy and Management, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Halligan, John and John Power (1992) Political Management in the 1990s, Melbourne:
’t Hart, P. (2010) ‘Lifting its game to get ahead: the Canberra bureaucracy’s reform
by stealth’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, July, http://www.australianreview.net/
digest/2010/07/thart.html
Hood, C. (1991) ‘A public management for all seasons?’ Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.
JCPAA (Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit) (2012) Report 432: APS – Fit
for Service, Parliamentary Paper 205/2012, House of Representatives, Parliament of
Australia, Canberra.
Management Advisory Committee (MAC) (2005) Senior Executive Service of the Australian
Public Service: One APS–One SES, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, http://www.
apsc.gov.au
Moran, T. (2009) Speech on Challenges of Public Sector Reform, Institute of Public
Administration Australia, 15 July, Canberra.
Moran, T. (2013) ‘Reforming to create value: our next five strategic directions’, Australian
Journal of Public Administration, 72(1), 1–6.
National Commission of Audit (1996) Report to the Commonwealth Government, Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
National Commission of Audit (2013) Terms of Reference.
OECD (1995) Governance in Transition: Public Management Reforms in OECD Countries,
Paris: OECD.
O’Flynn, J. (2007) ‘Elusive appeal or aspirational ideal? The rhetoric and reality of the
“collaborative turn” in public policy’, in J. O’Flynn and J. Wanna (eds), Collaborative
Governance: A New Era of Public Policy in Australia, Canberra: ANU E Press, pp. 181–195.
Painter, M. and J. Pierre (eds) (2005) Challenges to State Policy Capacity, Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Pal, L. (2012) Frontiers of Governance: The OECD and Global Public Management Reform,
Pollitt, C. (1990) Managerialism in the Public Service: The Anglo-American Experience,
Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Pollitt, C. (ed.) (2013) Context in Public Policy and Management: The Missing Link
Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Shergold, P. (2013) ‘My hopes for a public service for the future’, Australian Journal of Public
Administration, 72(1), 7–13.

15. Australia: building policy capacity for
managing wicked policy problems
Brian W. Head and Janine O’Flynn
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
Governments in Australia, as in many other countries, have wrestled

since the late 1970s with a series of structural reforms in the public sector,
intended as the foundation for improving governmental efficiency and
effectiveness, and thereby contributing to national economic productivity.
While these broad goals and directions of public sector reform have been
widely shared among the liberal-democratic countries, the methods and
pace of change were quite different, depending on the administrative tra-
ditions, local leadership and political ideologies prevalent in each country
(Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). This public sector reform process, designed
broadly in accordance with neoliberal principles of new public manage-
ment (NPM), was initially directed towards deregulating the economy,
redefining core roles for government, and enhancing efficiency in the
delivery of public services (Dunleavy and Hood 1994). These reforms were
initially focused on structures and managerial processes within the public
sector (e.g. divestment of ‘non-core’ functions, restructuring, and skills
development to enhance managerial efficiency), but the reform process
soon moved on to promote market-based approaches to service delivery
by non-government providers. Relationships with external service provid-
ers were developed and shaped through competitive tendering in many
areas, with new forms of performance-based service contracting.
By the early 2000s, contestability was well entrenched in most OECD
countries, and performance metrics were widely used in program man-
agement both within and beyond the core public sector (Bouckaert and
Halligan 2008). Australia was widely regarded as among the front-runners
in terms of implementing NPM principles of economic rationalism, com-
petition and outsourcing of service delivery. In recent years, the capacity
of the redesigned system in Australia to deliver efficient and effective
policy solutions and reliable public services has been repeatedly tested.
Four areas of political, economic and governance challenges have been
especially important.
First, national elections delivered political changes in 1996, 2007 and
341

2013, leading to stocktakes, audits, organizational restructuring and

new policy priorities driven by an incoming government. Changes in the
machinery of government have required renegotiation of how key public
agencies perform their core tasks and how they monitor and oversee the
work of third parties engaged in service delivery. The leadership group
in the Australian Public Service (APS) has generated a series of reviews
and new strategies that have focused on the capacities and flexibilities
required to deal with rapid change. Second, the international economic
environment has been somewhat turbulent during the last two decades,
including robust trade competition, exchange-rate adjustment pressures,
and repeated external economic shocks (the Asian financial crisis in the
late 1990s, and the global financial crisis and economic recession ongoing
since 2008). These external shocks and challenges have put pressure on
public budgets through reduced revenues and demands for compensatory
expenditures. Third, Australian governments have increasingly attempted
to address complex social and environmental policy challenges since the
late 1980s, some of which are discussed in more detail below. The need
to address several large and complex issues simultaneously has placed
the decision-making and policy advice systems under great pressure, and
has required innovative thinking both in relation to policy design and
implementation mechanisms.
Fourth, within the Australian federal system of government, many of
these complex challenges are not resolvable simply through the decisions
of the federal government acting alone. While the federal government has
undisputed authority in matters of international trade, finance, national
economic management and social security payments, the picture is less
clear-cut for many key areas of service delivery (Fenna and Hollander
2013). For example, the federal and state levels have shared roles in educa-
tion, health, housing and Indigenous services. In these policy areas, it has
become standard practice for policy and service agreements to be negoti-
ated between the federal government and the six states and two territories.
In such cases, policy and program settings are a product of bargaining in
a multi-level system. Moreover, in important social policy areas where the
service delivery capacities of non-government actors have become vital,
the capacity to move forward requires multisectoral collaborative solu-
tions and raises a range of boundary challenges in practice (O’Flynn 2014).
The complex economic, social and environmental problems faced by
contemporary Australia have demanded policy and governance innova-
tion. These have stretched the capacity of political and administrative
leaders to design, implement and evaluate new approaches and to identify
and manage new risks. This chapter considers the evolution of recent
attempts to increase the capacity of Australian government to manage

Australia: building policy capacity 343
complex policy challenges. We examine the institutional and network

mechanisms developed for these purposes, the performance management
frameworks used to clarify goals and accountabilities, and the impedi-
ments to innovation in a federal system. We also consider the inherent
trade-offs between innovation and risk management, the evidence base
for policy development, and the extent to which the wider availability of
research evidence and program evaluations in some key areas has assisted
in this quest for better performance. Finally, we consider the ongoing
challenges faced by government leaders who attempt to address wicked
problems using traditional policy instruments delivered through function-
ally based bureaucratic organizations.
PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM: OVERVIEW OF TRENDS,

CHALLENGES AND RESPONSES
The substantial reforms in Australian public administration over recent

decades were directed at (i) reshaping the structures, roles and manage-
rial efficiencies of public organizations, (ii) improving their capacities and
skills to undertake new roles, (iii) promoting competition and reducing
business regulation to increase productivity, and (iv) forging new rela-
tionships with the business and community sectors for providing publicly
funded services. While these four directions have proceeded in parallel,
the initial focus on reshaping the functions of public agencies entailed a
far-reaching and time-consuming work program. The strong critiques of
the public sector (as ponderous, rigid, monopolistic, unresponsive and
expensive) were increasingly accepted through the 1980s, and an alterna-
tive narrative of public sector reform emerged in the 1990s. Henceforth,
agencies responsible for service delivery were expected to become more
responsive and flexible, ensuring value-for-money services in a contest-
able environment. They were given more devolved authority to manage
their operations, and these managerial expectations were reinforced by
new funding mechanisms (e.g. results-based budgeting) and performance
management systems. Agencies were required to outsource many of their
program services through competitive tendering (Industry Commission
1996), and they invested in performance monitoring systems to demon-
strate the efficiency and effectiveness of their programs (Halligan and
Power 1992; Clark and Corbett 1999).
Public regulatory agencies and compliance/enforcement agencies were
formally separated from agencies that were providing services to citizens
and stakeholders. Business regulation was reduced, and government-
owned business enterprises were sold to the private sector. Superfluous

public bodies were abolished, and service delivery departments underwent

processes of consolidation (e.g. the creation of ‘mega’-departments in
1987). Major agencies retained a capacity to provide policy advice to their
minister, but alternative sources of advice were increasingly available from
business associations, consultancy firms, lobbyists and think tanks. The
policy coordination role of the central policy agencies (Prime Minister and
Cabinet, Treasury, and Finance) was strengthened in order to steer the
reform agenda.
The scale of reform increased as leaders moved beyond the efficiency
agenda in individual public agencies. In particular, government leaders
moved to tackle the perceived systemic barriers and regulatory obstacles
to national economic productivity (Forsyth 1992), and they also began
to promote more effective delivery of human services programs through
competitive tendering (Davis and Weller 2001). Commercialization, pri-
vatization and market-based approaches were strongly favoured despite
some resistance from established public sector providers. The reform
process was conducted separately in each governmental jurisdiction (the
federal government, the six states and two territories), but a very high
level of policy transfer and institutional mimicry was evident, and there
was a noteworthy trend towards policy convergence on the main features
of market-based reform.
Microeconomic reform principles, based on economic rationalism,
were applied to a wide range of regulatory challenges, especially public
utilities and public infrastructure in each jurisdiction (Forsyth 1992). The
reform agenda was elevated by Prime Minister Hawke in mid-1990, when
he announced a series of special premiers’ conferences to tackle nation-
wide issues of efficiency and productivity. After some important reform
agreements, widely attributed to the new processes of ‘cooperative feder-
alism’, this intergovernmental forum was redesignated as the Council of
Australian Governments (COAG), and given the task of addressing major
issues of national importance. The development of a national competition
policy framework, and its endorsement by all jurisdictions during 1993–94,
was a landmark COAG achievement (Carroll and Painter 1995; Painter
1998). The scale and significance of the problems had prompted fresh stra-
tegic thinking about the institutional mechanisms needed for driving this
new agenda in a coordinated way. However, the states remained unhappy
that their fiscal dependency (i.e. their reliance on transfer payments from
the dominant federal government) was not recognized as a public sector
capacity problem.
The strength of the COAG reform process arose from top–down coor-
dination through a powerful network of central agencies (Weller 1996),
facilitated and strengthened by political support from senior ministers.

Subject to such support, central agencies became bolder in identifying

key issues requiring national attention. This powerful political–bureau-
cratic reform alliance had been prompted by the perceived urgency of
microeconomic reform. Over time, the agenda was broadened to consider
complex issues in human services delivery and sustainable development
that required agreements between the levels of government. In particular,
central agencies began to use national forums selectively to reshape major
social program areas and to negotiate settlements in areas of conflict
between environmental protection and resource development agencies.
This approach occurred alongside the more market-based reforms, organ-
izational disaggregation and the adoption of new performance regimes
that focused agencies more narrowly, setting the scene for the next era of
reform.
An important lesson drawn from this period was that institutional inno-
vation and capacity-building were necessary to support major reforms
with broad impacts (APSC 2003; Lindquist et al. 2011). The level of politi-
cal appetite for tackling ‘big issues’ was unusually robust among leaders in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hence the underlying challenge for policy
bureaucrats was how to enhance strategic policy capacity and coordina-
tion capacity across the federation. Chaired by the prime minister, the
Council of Australian Governments provided political and administrative
impetus for reforms that required the cooperation, or at least acquies-
cence, of the states. The formal legislative powers of the federal govern-
ment were considerable but were insufficient to deal with many issues. A
wider range of policy instruments became necessary, including financial
incentives for state compliance with competition policy reforms in the
public utilities sector, and a large number of federal/state agreements in
human services (e.g. health, education, training, housing, disability ser-
vices and Indigenous services). These agreements stipulated shared policy
objectives and performance indicators, and were tied to large financial
transfer payments.
It had become clear by the 1980s and 1990s that many policy goals tran-
scended the boundaries of individual departmental responsibilities. The
rhetoric of ‘joined-up government’ in the UK was complemented by the
rhetoric of ‘whole-of-government’ coordination in Australia (O’Flynn et
al. 2014). This cooperative agenda within the public sector became widely
discussed, at two levels – line agencies within each jurisdiction (e.g. within
the Australian Public Service) were encouraged by central agencies to
cooperate more fully to achieve shared objectives; and at the nationwide or
systemic level, the intergovernmental strategic policy agenda was pursued
through the COAG process. Paradoxically, much of the impetus for build-
ing better capacity for problem-solving had its origins in the efficiency and

arket-
m oriented directions of NPM, but the collaborative instruments
chosen for achieving better integration extended across wide areas of policy,
raising expectations that narrow top–down solutions were unlikely to be
effective. A related wave of enthusiasm for consultative and stakeholder-
oriented governance models emerged in the late 1990s and began to influ-
ence the rhetoric of responsive and customer-focused service provision.
THE PUBLIC SERVICE INNOVATION AGENDA
A range of major reports released throughout the 2000s reflected these

concerns, mapping out the various drivers for change and calling for a
range of solutions – with collaboration, innovation and engagement all
becoming central to the task of transforming government. At the centre of
these manifestos was a theme of building capacity in the APS to address
these increasingly complex demands. In Connecting Government, published
by the Management Advisory Committee of senior officials (MAC 2004),
a more joined-up approach was positioned as central to how government
would operate with a clear aspiration to develop a collaborative culture
across the APS. Introducing the report, the Secretary of the Department
of the Prime Minister and Cabinet argued that ‘whole of government is
the public administration of the future . . . [the means] to face the gov-
ernance challenges of the 21st century’ (Shergold 2004). The Connecting
Government report was focused on the importance of driving fundamental
change in structures, systems, skills and cultures to build the capacity to
work in a more collaborative, joined-up fashion: ‘The report does not
believe that effective solutions lie in moving around the deckchairs of
bureaucratic endeavor. Rather it reinforces the need to continue to build
[a] culture that supports, models, understands and aspires to the whole
of government solutions’ (MAC 2004: v). The political–bureaucratic
commitment to the collaborative project was strong: Cabinet processes
were amended to encourage a more whole-of-government approach, new
interdepartmental structures were developed, COAG was reinvigorated,
new coordinating units were established in the Department of the Prime
Minister and Cabinet, and new attempts at integrated service delivery were
fashioned (O’Flynn et al. 2011).
In 2007, the APSC released two major reports of relevance. The first,
Changing Behaviour (APSC 2007a), focused on how government could
influence the behaviour of citizens in an attempt to overcome barriers to
effective policy implementation. The rise of increasingly complex issues,
it was argued, demanded new approaches that combined traditional
instruments with behavioural insights; this reflected the acceptance that

government could not solve these complex, often wicked, problems alone.
The need to address rising rates of obesity, the need to reduce tobacco
use, and the need for cooperative approaches to improved management
of natural resources were used as examples of how more nuanced policy
measures were required to deliver outcomes. These new, potentially more
sophisticated approaches to policy design and implementation, however,
would demand cooperation across boundaries, increased engagement with
stakeholders, and the development of new types of skills in the APS. The
capacity to operationalize a more behaviourally focused approach was an
important part of the recommendations and conclusions.
In the same year, the APSC released its Tackling Wicked Problems
report (APSC 2007b). This built on the joined- up agenda from the
Connecting Government (MAC 2004) agenda, but specifically emphasized
those policy issues that Rittel and Webber (1973) had famously character-
ized as ‘wicked’ or intractable. The report pointed to the importance of
working across boundaries, including those between agencies within the
APS sector, and between the federal government and the states. There was
also attention to further devolving governmental authority, better engag-
ing stakeholders, and the development of new skills that public servants
would require in these challenging contexts. Collaboration and innovation
were seen as critical tools in tackling these wicked problems, and there
was a greater emphasis on addressing capacity issues by showing how
the current ways of operating and the current skill sets of public servants
constrained the ability of the APS to address these wicked issues.
By the late 2000s the Australian government was looking to technologi-
cal solutions and released its report Engage (Government 2.0 Taskforce
2009), which set out a blueprint for how agencies and public servants
could use Web 2.0 tools to connect with each other and with communities,
and potentially to transform policy and service delivery. These potential
achievements, however, required culture change, the freeing up of infor-
mation, and a movement away from the traditional hierarchical model –
all aspirational goals indeed.
A major blueprint for reform of the APS, Ahead of the Game (AGRAGA
2010), was published soon after. Emerging from a thorough review of the
APS, the report was the most comprehensive manifesto for public service
change that had been produced for some time in Australia. Key themes
identified in the previous reports were prominent – collaboration, joining
up, engagement, innovation and capacity-building all featured. The report
was introduced as
an ambitious and interlinked reform agenda that seeks to improve services,

programs and policies for Australian citizens. Above all, it recognises that to

be strong, the APS must make the most of the talents, energy and integrity of
its people. The proposed reforms therefore seek to boost and support the APS
workforce and leadership, and to embed new practices and behaviour into the
APS culture. (AGRAGA 2010: xi)
At the centre of the report was the notion of a ‘high performance public
service’ which would: meet the needs of citizens through high-quality,
tailored public services and engage them in design and development of
policy and services; contain strong leadership and have a strategic direc-
tion; be reliant on a highly capable workforce; and operate efficiently and
consistently at a high standard. Nine report themes were identified to
underpin this transformation, ranging from more client-centred services,
more open government, enhanced policy capacity, and developing agency
agility, effectiveness and capability. Ahead of the Game (AGRAGA
2010) exhibited an increasingly familiar mix of behavioural change,
capacity-building and culture change, and an emphasis on joining up, co-
production and engagement. The blueprint had echoes of previous reform
agendas and manifestos, most of which had been proposed in isolation,
with limited success. Bringing these together in a macro-level blueprint
may have been considered novel and powerful (Lindquist 2010; ’t Hart
2010; Moran 2013), but the fundamental obstacles to the various reforms
remained firmly embedded.
In the same year as Ahead of the Game, a complementary report on
Empowering Change (MAC 2010) was released. This report, steered by
the Management Advisory Committee, set out a blueprint for fostering
innovation in the APS, drawing on international literature, and build-
ing on key ideas from Ahead of the Game (AGRAGA 2010) connected
to the notion of a ‘high-performing’ public service. In the introduction
to the report it was argued that major changes were needed to the APS,
‘both how it thinks and how it operates’, and that the ‘red tape and siloed
thinking’ of the past would have ‘no place in the high performing APS
our citizens expect and deserve’ (MAC 2010: iii). Recommendations from
the report focused on familiar themes – strategy and culture, information
flows, technology, leadership, structural barriers, funding, technology and
collaboration.
This series of reports through the 2000s points to the considerable atten-
tion the APS was directing towards the range of challenges confronting it,
the increasing complexity of the policy challenges it faced, and the need
to increase policy capacity to deal with this. Throughout that decade new
ways of operating were promulgated, and much was written and said of
the need for innovation, for cultural change, for new modes of leadership,
for changing the basic structures and systems, and for developing new

capacity based on twenty-first-century skills and capabilities. However,

the practical implementation of these reforms has fallen far short of the
aspirations. Whilst identifying and addressing the barriers to each of the
big ideas contained within them, the reports appear to have had little
impact on the standing arrangements that, as they rightly pointed out, con-
strain their ability to deliver on these aspirations. Major tensions emerged
between these new, highly desired, ways of operating and the embedded
approaches. For example, the report on Connecting Government (MAC
2004) had advocated large-scale structural and cultural change to enable
collaboration and a whole-of-government approach, but little was done
to change the existing architecture of government: budgets, programs,
departments, performance regimes and so on, remained internally focused.
The tensions between the new and old frameworks have persisted
throughout recent decades. These tensions are very clear in two major
policy domains discussed below, namely, (i) the federal government’s
response to Indigenous disadvantage, and (ii) the federal government’s
responses to pressing challenges in natural resource management and
climate change. Both of these policy domains are key examples of ‘wicked’
problems, understood as major policy issues exhibiting high levels of
system complexity, stakeholder diversity, knowledge uncertainty and
ongoing change (Rittel and Webber 1973; APSC 2007b; Head 2008, 2010;
Head and Alford 2015).
In the following section we provide a background to each of these policy
areas, set out the policy architecture that has been created and adapted to
deal with them, and draw out outcomes and implications for discussion.
These cases highlight both a commitment to reconfiguration to address
these wicked problems but also the challenges that are confronted in
attempts to do so.
RESPONDING TO INDIGENOUS DISADVANTAGE
Background
The federal government has a long, and mixed, experience in responding

to Indigenous disadvantage. The challenges are numerous, with the full
range of socioeconomic indicators pointing to the substantial disadvan-
tage experienced by Indigenous Australians. There is wide acceptance
that these issues are interconnected, complex and resistant to the numer-
ous interventions that have been attempted over several decades; in this
sense this issue is a classic ‘wicked’ problem (Rittel and Webber 1973).
We focus specifically on developments since the early 2000s, as this has

represented an era of substantial experimentation, political–bureaucratic

transformation, and strategic intergovernment agreements that accept this
wickedness, yet have attempted to establish strategies to address it.
Despite decades of policy experimentation to address chronic disadvan-
tage, persistent and significant gaps remain between the Indigenous and
non-Indigenous populations of Australia. This remains persistently true
regardless of the substantial expenditures that have been made (see Altman
et al. 2008 for an alternative view on progress). In a major report of the
Australian National Audit Office (ANAO 2007), it was estimated that the
federal government alone spent $A3.5 billion in 2007–08 in attempts to
address this. Another report, this time by the Productivity Commission
(2012), examined Indigenous expenditure in Australia and identified a
combined spend of some $A25.4 billion in 2010–11 (all governments); this
represented 5.6 per cent of total direct government expenditure for 2.6 per
cent of the Australian population. Of this expenditure, $A11.5 billion was
spent by the federal government and $A13.9 billion by state and territory
governments; and of this total, $A25.4, $A5.5 billion was on Indigenous
specific services – the remaining $A19.9 billion was embedded in ‘main-
stream’ services. The report estimated that this translated into expenditure
of $A44 128 per head for Indigenous Australians compared with $A19 589
for non-Indigenous.
Socioeconomic indicators across a range of areas continue to paint a
bleak picture, and the focus on these has continued to spur governments
in Australia into action, in particular over the last decade or so. Specific
estimates/indicators vary, but broadly we know that: life expectancy at
birth is 20 years lower for Indigenous Australians; infant mortality rates
are double those for the non-Indigenous population; Indigenous primary
school students have lower levels of numeracy and literacy, secondary
school students have lower completion rates and university enrolments are
around half those of the broader population. Labour force participation
rates trail, with unemployment rates triple those for the non-Indigenous
population, while rates of suicide, homicide, hospitalization for assault,
and incarceration all exceed the broader population (Prime Minister
of Australia 2010; Steering Committee for the Review of Government
Service Provision 2003). Whilst there is bipartisan agreement on the wick-
edness of the issue, the challenge of responding to disadvantage cannot
be underestimated. However, in a report by newly elected Prime Minister
Tony Abbott (Prime Minister of Australia 2014: 2), he noted:
No one should be under any illusion about the difficulty of swiftly overcoming
two centuries of comparative failure. Nevertheless, it would be complacent,
even neglectful, to not address, from day one, the most intractable difficulty
our country has ever faced.

Indeed, where work has been done to estimate the time required to ‘close
the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, the scale
and scope of the challenge becomes formidable. In their report, Altman
et al. (2008) indicate that convergence between these population groups
may, in reality, take several generations to address.1 Based on these
estimates, closing the life expectancy gap will take more than 100 years
for men and around 47 years for women; more than 100 years to close
the home ownership gap; 94 years to address the gap in median weekly
incomes; 44 (25*) years to overcome the differences in post-school quali-
fications for adults; and 100 years (*) or more to converge on equal rates
of degree or higher qualifications. This bleak picture has fuelled increasing
policy experimentation and positioned addressing Indigenous disadvan-
tage as a wicked problem in government discourse, and one that requires
new approaches. In launching the Connecting Government report, the
Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet singled
out this issue for attention:
Now comes the biggest test of whether the rhetoric of connectivity can be mar-
shaled into effective action. The Australian Government is about to embark on
a bold experiment in implementing a whole of government approach to policy
development and delivery . . . and the embrace of a quite different approach
to the administration of Indigenous specific programs and services. (Shergold
2004)
Similar sentiments were also expressed in the Tackling Wicked Problems

report:
Indigenous disadvantage is an ongoing, seemingly intractable issue . . . The

need for coordination and an overarching strategy among the services and
programs supported by the various levels of government . . . is also a key
ingredient. (APSC 2007b: 2)
Responding to the wickedness of Indigenous disadvantage is complex

and there has been considerable stock placed in the power of joined-
up approaches over the last decade in Australia. This mirrors broader
attempts discussed above to engage in more collaborative, whole-of-
government ways of working. It also reflects an acceptance that past
attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Such frustration spurred new
approaches through the 2000s that have required large-scale transfor-
mation of the political and bureaucratic architecture. Attempts to do
this, as will be discussed, were hampered by embedded modes of oper-
ating and the challenges that permeate both bureaucratic and political
domains.

The Policy Architecture
Attempting to address the breadth and depth of the challenges faced by

Indigenous people has occupied governments across Australia for decades.
Here we focus specifically on the changing policy architecture since the
early to mid-2000s because this period captures a series of experiments
requiring radical reconfiguration of both the policy and bureaucratic
architecture and relationships with Indigenous Australians. We focus on
four main stages that reflect the trajectory of how the federal government
has attempted to respond to Indigenous disadvantage: the COAG trials;
the new Indigenous Affairs Arrangements; the creation of Indigenous
Coordination Centres (ICCs); and the development and implementation
of the Closing the Gap agreement between the governments of Australia.
1. The Council of Australian Government trials

The election of the Liberal–National government in 1996 signalled the
start of a new approach to responding to Indigenous disadvantage in
Australia; however, it took several years to broker the bipartisan political
support needed to enact this large-scale change. In 2002 the ‘new deal’ in
Indigenous affairs began with agreement, via COAG, to run a series of
trials in a new way of working. These ‘COAG trials’ took place in eight
sites across Australia and they relied on governments working together
more collaboratively and new forms of engagement with communities.
The trials incorporated Shared Responsibility Agreements (SRA), essen-
tially a quasi-contract between communities and governments based
on the principle of mutual obligation. These agreements attracted con-
siderable public debate and were a controversial part of the new gov-
ernment’s plan to transform Indigenous affairs in Australia. One that
attracted considerable attention was the Mulan SRA, struck between the
Mulan Aboriginal Community in the Kimberly region of Australian and
federal and West Australian governments. In the agreement, commu-
nity members agreed, among other things, to daily showers for children,
washing their faces twice a day, school attendance and keeping houses
clean; the federal government agreed to install petrol bowsers that could
deliver non-sniffable petrol; and the West Australian state government
agreed to review the adequacy of health services to the community (see
McCausland 2005 for more).
The rationale for the COAG trials was that they provided an oppor-
tunity to be innovative, experiment with new ways of working, develop
approaches more tailored to community needs, and cut through the red
tape that constrained government’s ability to address this wicked problem.
The COAG trials were, not surprisingly, incredibly controversial and there

was widespread critique (see Collard et al. 2005 for example); the influ-
ence of the trials was, however, substantial in setting out the next era of
architectural change in this policy area.
Whilst it is important to recognize the influence of the trials, it is also
important to reflect on the formal evaluations at the time, which shone
a light on to the embedded barriers to more joined-up approaches and
the inherent challenges in this policy area. These reviews pointed to some
success but placed attention on the entrenched barriers to scaling up this
model. Several important requirements for joined-up success (see O’Flynn
2014) were missing; for example, shared objectives and priorities, skills for
cross-boundary working, and new leadership styles (Morgan Disney &
Associates 2006). The trials, then, gave designers of a new approach to
responding to Indigenous disadvantage plenty of indication as to the
challenges that would be faced as they sought to redesign the policy and
delivery architecture through the mid-2000s and beyond.
2. The new Indigenous Affairs Arrangements

Despite being elected in 1996, it took the Liberal–National govern-
ment considerable time to garner the bipartisan support it needed for
the radical transformation of Indigenous affairs. This included both
political and institutional transformation. In 2004 the massive reforms
to institutional arrangements and policy were laid out in the Indigenous
Affairs Arrangements (IAAs), which sought to ‘provide high-level stake-
holder involvement through a Ministerial Taskforce, a framework for
departmental collaboration . . . and on-the-ground through a network of
Indigenous Coordination Centres’ (ANAO 2007: 12).
A controversial part of the transformation was the dismantling of the
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC),2 the peak
representative body for Indigenous Australians. This statutory authority
was created in 1990 to ensure that Indigenous people were involved in
the governance activities that affected their lives. ATSIC comprised 35
regional councils and a national board of commissioners, and, in addi-
tion to being the peak representative body, it had developed considerable
responsibility for the delivery of programs to Indigenous Australians.
ATSIC was disbanded in 2005 following the passing of the ATSIC
Amendment Bill, which also abolished regional councils, effectively
removing political representation for Indigenous Australians.
The political and bureaucratic reforms set out in the IAAs sought
to transform the way in which responses to Indigenous disadvan-
tage were developed and implemented. In the political domain, the
Ministerial Taskforce on Indigenous Affairs was created to ensure
ongoing c ommitment to tackling disadvantage. All ministers with day-to-

day responsibility for programs and services that focused on Indigenous

Australians were members of the taskforce, which was required to focus
on setting long-term strategic policy goals in this area. The taskforce
connected with the bureaucratic domain via the Secretaries’ Group on
Indigenous Affairs (SGIA), which was charged with supporting minister
ial goals and implementing decisions of the taskforce. The Secretaries’
Group had formal responsibility for driving reforms related to the IAAs
and the group stated early on in its term that reform success rested on an
ability to work in a more collaborative, joined-up fashion (SGIA 2005).
The Secretaries’ Group was supported by the Indigenous Communities
Coordination Taskforce, which was given responsibility for leading the
required coordination across various departments and jurisdictions, and
also the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination (OIPC), with respon-
sibility for whole-of-government coordination, community engagement
strategies, overseeing intergovernmental relationships and monitoring
performance (see KPMG 2007).
As this political and bureaucratic transformation took place, the
COAG trials were under way, throwing up examples of inspiration and
frustration in terms of the ability of governments to experiment, innovate
and work more collaboratively, but also how to work with Indigenous
communities. As mentioned, the evaluation of these trials was mixed,
with some evidence of innovation, but plenty of acknowledgement of the
entrenched barriers to new ways of working. There is no doubt, however,
that they provided the first major test of operationalizing a more joined-up
approach to tackling Indigenous disadvantage in Australia.
3. The creation of Indigenous Coordination Centres

The COAG trials were the genesis for the next major stage in tack-
ling Indigenous disadvantage, the creation of Indigenous Coordination
Centres (ICCs). These were intended to be permanent hubs for policy
coordination, service delivery and community engagement, operating
across Australia and encapsulating key learning from the COAG trials.
The ICCs were considered the front line of the bold experiment in respond-
ing to Indigenous disadvantage in Australia (Shergold 2004) and were to
be the vehicle for ‘local responsiveness, community-based innovation and
negotiation’ (SGIA 2005: v).
Thirty ICCs were established beginning in 2004, with locations across
urban, rural and remote Australia. The centres drew together multiple
departments/agencies from across government and created ‘portals’ into
government for Indigenous Australians. A process of mapping where
staff were working in areas related to Indigenous issues was undertaken to
identify the relevant organizations to be represented and, by 2006, there

were some 562 Commonwealth public servants located in the ICCs, which
were overseen by the Department of Families, Housing, Community
Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). In some cases, state and ter-
ritory government also had representation. Staff in the centres carried out
three main roles: program administration; solution brokering to provide
a bridge between community needs and the various programs offered
by departments; and developing SRAs with local communities (ANAO
2007).
The ICCs were seen as the face of the transformation of the political and
bureaucratic architecture. However, despite the boldness of this experi-
ment, there is limited empirical work that has evaluated its success or oth-
erwise. In their study, O’Flynn et al. (2011), who examined the functioning
of ICCs as representations of joined-up government approaches, found
that generally the model underperformed against its intentions. This was
mainly due to embedded barriers to collaboration. In particular, they
pointed to three factors: the failure to design a supporting architecture
that could undergird a more joined-up approach – including authority
structures, training and development, financial arrangements; the con-
tinued programmatic focus, which created vertical–horizontal tensions;
and centralized decision-making. Where they identified success it was
centred on deep relational capital and a craftsmanship style of leader-
ship that enable some centres to prosper, despite the embedded barriers.
They warned, however, that it was unrealistic to build ways of operating
that could produce these outcomes until these entrenched barriers were
addressed.
A series of evaluations of ICCs supports the findings of O’Flynn et al.
(2011), but also strongly echo the review of the COAG trials. These reports
(ANAO 2007; KPMG 2007; Morgan Disney & Associates 2006) indicated
that barriers identified in the trials had not been addressed, and remained
a major impediment to the success of the ICC model. The evidence to date
shows that the ICCs were not able to fulfil their bold ambitions in practice.
4. The Council of Australian Governments ‘Closing the Gap’ agreement

A major redesign of the policy architecture, building on the previous
three stages, emerged in 2007 with the election of the Labor govern-
ment. One of the first acts of the new government in 2008 was to offer
an apology to Indigenous Australians and to push forward with an inter-
governmental strategy to ‘close the gap’. Late in 2007 it was announced
that COAG had settled on a new approach and this was formalized via
the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA) in 2008 (COAG
2008). The NIRA, which was known as ‘Closing the Gap’, set out the
new architecture – a range of objectives, outcomes, outputs, performance

indicators and benchmarks against which progress could be tracked, and

a range of new funding partnerships was announced. Most of the atten-
tion came to bear on the targets that were agreed as part of the NIRA and
against which the prime minister agreed to report annually. The ambi-
tious targets, agreed by all governments across Australia, covered impor-
tant socioeconomic indicators that reflected the entrenched disadvantage
experienced by Indigenous Australians. Closing the Gap committed the
various governments to the following aims:
● close the gap in life expectancy within a generation (by 2031);

● halve the gap in mortality rates for Indigenous children under five
by 2018;
● ensure access to early childhood education for all Indigenous four-
year-olds in remote communities by 2013;
● halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for
children by 2018;
● halve the gap for Indigenous students in Year 12 (or equivalent)
attainment rates by 2020;
● halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and
other Australians by 2018.
To achieve these, a series of eight ‘building blocks’ or areas for action

were agreed, each seen to contribute to the Closing the Gap targets: early
childhood; schooling; health; economic participation; healthy homes;
safe communities; and governance and leadership. Alongside this, gov-
ernments committed to major investments across these areas, including
$A4.6 billion in Indigenous specific funding for the following decade.
Again there was focus on the need for a new approach, recognition of the
entrenched disadvantage of Indigenous Australians and a focus on a more
collaborative, joined-up approach as the means to address this wicked
problem.
An unprecedented level of cooperation and coordination between the

Commonwealth and State and Territory Governments is needed to deliver on
this commitment to Close the Gap. The Commonwealth, State and Territory
Governments are committed through COAG to the Closing the Gap agenda
and this partnership, underpinned by effective engagement with Indigenous
Australians, establishes a genuinely national approach. (COAG 2008: A-17)
As mentioned earlier, the modelling undertaken on how long it might

take to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians
showed that this would require a long-term commitment (Altman et al.,
2008). The targets set out in the NIRA, therefore, were bold and ambitious

when compared to these estimates. Part of the agreement was to report

annually on progress, and the series of reports subsequently released has
played an important role in cataloguing the range of activities focused
on improving the lives of Indigenous Australians, tracking performance
against the targets, and areas where attention is needed. By 2013 good
progress had been recorded on some targets: in the 2013 report it was
announced that the early childhood target would be achieved, that the
infant mortality target was on track and that the Year 12 educational
achievement target was ahead of schedule (Prime Minister of Australia
2013). Yet it was also accepted that some of the targets would be extraor-
dinarily difficult to achieve, with closing the gap on life expectancy and
employment outcomes the most challenging.
In addition to the prime minister’s reports, which were mainly about
cataloguing activity, the COAG Reform Council also reported on per-
formance progress annually. These reports provided much more detailed
analysis of the performance against targets, and pointed to success and
risks. For example, in its 2013 report (COAG Reform Council 2013),
the council noted that there had been little improvement in Indigenous
reading rates and that there had been decreases in numeracy rates across
the board. Further, it was reported that the gap in employment, labour
force participation and unemployment had widened in the period 2006–11.
Little progress was reported on closing the gap in rates of death; indeed,
in some states it was reported that this had not changed significantly since
1998.
The election of the Liberal–National government in 2013 signalled more
change in the policy architecture. Whilst the ‘Closing the Gap’ approach
remains in place, arrangements to deliver on Indigenous disadvantage
were changed. One of the first acts of the new prime minister was to cen-
tralize the administration of more than 150 Indigenous programs from
across eight federal government departments into the Department of the
Prime Minister and Cabinet on the basis that this would allow for a major
overhaul of administration, remove duplication and enable a simpler
approach. He also made it clear in his first Closing the Gap report that he
wanted to shift the focus from what government is doing (i.e. his view of
the government’s reporting on Closing the Gap) to how Indigenous people
were living (Prime Minister of Australia 2014). In his report, the prime
minister lamented that progress had been too slow, or non-existent in
some areas, that there has been too much attention to spending and gov-
ernment activity, and too little attention to outcomes. He announced that
there was still bipartisan support for Closing the Gap, but that he would
refocus attention on three main areas: getting children into school; getting
adults into work; and safer Indigenous communities.

Outcomes and Implications
There can be no doubt that responding to Indigenous disadvantage is

one of the most challenging policy areas confronting governments in
Australia. The previous decade has seen major experimentation with
approaches and, in particular, with how government organizes itself to
confront this wicked problem. The evidence on its success, however, is
mixed. Organizationally, governments have struggled to work together
more collaboratively due to a series of embedded barriers that seem resist-
ant even to the most enthusiastic political and bureaucratic leadership
(O’Flynn et al. 2011). Throughout the 2000s the stages of architectural
change have focused more and more on partnership, collaboration and
innovation, without enough attention to the fundamental barriers that
permeate government operations (O’Flynn 2014), and the outcomes for
Indigenous people have not yet been realized to the extent that has been
intended.
Part of this is a reflection of the inherent wickedness of the challenge,
part the failure of governments to confront their own organizational
dysfunctions. Combined, this means that a decade of radical change and
substantial investments has so far not produced major shifts in the most
critical socioeconomic indicators – those that will reflect a transformation
in the position of Indigenous Australians in society. The time frames for
Closing the Gap are aspirational in many cases, and the outcomes desired
may take generations to be achieved. The building blocks may be in place,
but the challenge in all of this, of course, is how to maintain the commit-
ment of political and bureaucratic actors to goals that they will not be able
to claim as their own achievements.
RESPONDING TO NRM AND CLIMATE CHANGE

CHALLENGES
Background
The federal government has become increasingly involved since the 1980s
in developing policy responses to pressing challenges in natural resource
management (NRM) and climate change. Historically these issues have
been matters of state-level responsibility in the federation. However, the
federal government has become more active in seeking better solutions for
the major ongoing challenges in land, water and resource management
and other aspects of environmental planning (Dovers and Wild River
2003). The range of issues is substantial and diverse, reflecting the wide

variety of landscapes, resource endowments and patterns of urbanization

across a vast continent.
The national State of the Environment report (Department of
Environment 2011) summed up the major ongoing issues identified
by expert panels in environmental science: greenhouse gas emissions;
urban air quality; ecosystem health of inland waterways; adequate water
resources for urban and industrial uses; quality of land and soils; destruc-
tion of biodiversity; marine ecosystems protection; natural and cultural
heritage protection; and planning for intensively populated coastal areas.
In short, Australia faces similar types of environmental and NRM stress
as other countries, but the mix and intensity of issues in Australia entail
several unique challenges. General drivers for change have been enlivened
by emergent crises, such as the increased awareness of pollution threats
to marine water quality in the Great Barrier Reef, rising understanding
of soil salinity issues in many agricultural regions, and extensive prob-
lems for inland river systems and irrigated agriculture stemming from the
long drought that commenced around 2000. Underlying issues that had
remained politically dormant sprang to life in response to these crises and
challenges.
Such major policy challenges can be seen as ‘wicked’ because the NRM
and environmental processes are interconnected, with complex chains
of causality; and while the problems have now been well documented
through scientific inquiry, their scope and significance remain deeply con-
tested by stakeholder interests. Moreover, viable solutions may require
diverse actors to work effectively together for the first time; and, as prob-
lems continue to evolve, program designs may require constant adjust-
ment along with a changing mix of policy instruments. Natural resources
problems generally require adaptive management within an overall frame-
work of sustainability principles and key desired outcomes (Adger and
Jordan 2009).
Approaches to environmental and natural resources policy have evolved
not only in response to these substantive problems, but also in response to
changing fashions and capacities in public policy and governance arrange-
ments (Head 2009). Early attempts to address these issues were focused on
setting and enforcing regulatory standards (most notably, concerning haz-
ardous chemicals and waste materials). While governments initially saw
this as politically risky, regulatory standard-setting gained legitimacy and
community support over time. However, it was soon evident that other big
issues would need different approaches. For example, in relation to land-
care and catchment management on a regional scale, it became clear that
involving local landholders in sustainable management practices would
be essential. Traditional approaches had failed to correct the long history

of subsidization and over-allocation of scarce water resources. Hence,

from the late 1990s, the NPM principles of efficiency and user-pays were
increasingly applied to valuable natural resources such as water. The large
issues, however, were continually bound up in administrative and legal
tangles arising from the division of powers in a federation, and embedded
in ongoing disputes about the appropriate roles of government, private
businesses, consumers and expert advisers.
The Policy Architecture
Environmental and NRM policy issues have achieved increasing promi-

nence since the 1970s, and state-level legislation began to incorporate
standards and objectives for environmental protection. The states have
had the main policy responsibilities but little funding to implement effective
frameworks. By contrast, the federal government has had large financial
resources but limited constitutional powers over environmental matters
(federal environmental responsibilities are codified in the Environment
Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999). Depending on its
political will to intervene, the federal government can expand its policy
influence through four mechanisms: political–administrative leadership
through chairing intergovernmental councils and forums; financial lever-
age via conditional grants to other levels of government or to business
organizations; regulatory leverage through its constitutional powers over
corporations; and strategic policy leverage through its external affairs and
treaty-making powers (hence, for example, the federal government inter-
vened in 1983 to declare a World Heritage conservation area in the state of
Tasmania despite opposition from the state government).
The states have continued to develop policies, programs and admin-
istrative structures to address local and sub-regional issues, but many of
the large environmental challenges in Australia extend across state and
regional boundaries. From the 1980s the federal government strengthened
its roles in providing strategic environmental policy leadership and finan-
cial incentives for improved natural resource management. Three exam-
ples are briefly outlined to illustrate how the financial, legal and political
levers available to the federal government were deployed to tackle issues
that the states acting alone could not have resolved.
1. Water resources in the Murray–Darling Basin

Occupying one-seventh of Australia, this major river basin extends across
several jurisdictional borders. Businesses and natural resource use have
been subject to the regulatory and developmental policies of four states
(New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia) and the

Australian Capital Territory. The intergovernmental Murray–Darling

Ministerial Council, which also included the federal government, oversaw
the political–administrative governance of cross-border issues for several
decades but was unable to deal with tough issues. In particular, the states
had difficulty, individually and collectively, in addressing three major
issues: the trade-off between water use for industry (irrigated agriculture)
and environment (river health and biodiversity); the introduction of full-
cost pricing for extracted water; and the introduction of a water trading
market to facilitate buy-backs and retirement of water extraction licences.
During the long drought of 2001–08, the pressures for concerted action
intensified (Hussey and Dovers 2007; Crase 2008). The federal govern-
ment asserted its political, legal and financial strength to negotiate agree-
ments under which the states ceded the legal powers necessary for a single
federal authority to be established, to undertake integrated water planning.
Additional federal legislation also established a market for irrigation water
in the Basin, and statutory powers to reserve water for environmental
flows (Quiggin et al. 2012). This strategic policy solution involved elements
of collaborative governance, market-based instruments and traditional
regulatory authority to change the paradigm for water management in the
Basin. There was a reasonable degree of bipartisan support in the federal
parliament for the reform process, allowing breakthroughs to be achieved
despite the complex local politics concerning water targets and trade-offs
in each sub-region. The scientific evidence concerning the need for action
and the scope for significant change was insufficient to convince many local
stakeholders that the socioeconomic impacts could be readily managed.
2. Regional NRM planning

Natural resource management issues in Australia have focused on rural
industries: their use of land and coastal resources for farming, forestry,
mining and fisheries, and the impacts of these activities on the long-term
sustainability of natural resources and environmental assets. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, the federal government began to encourage ‘eco-
logically sustainable’ approaches to rural industries in order to avoid
further degradation of land and water resources. Owing to the inher-
ent conflicts between economic development lobbies and environmental
advocacy groups, the federal government invested in science initiatives
to strengthen the information base for impact assessment, and for deter-
mining reasonable limits for resource extraction (e.g. forestry assessment
processes were established to facilitate sustainable harvesting while pro-
tecting ‘old-growth’ forests). Landholders were also encouraged to take
responsibility for improved management of their properties. Governments
could not compel the adoption of better farming techniques, but they were

able to encourage local landholder groups to champion new approaches.

State-level landcare initiatives were provided with additional federal funds
(Campbell 1994; Curtis and Lockwood 2000), and new federal programs
encouraged NRM planning and assessments at a ‘regional’ scale appro-
priate to the bio-physical scale of landscape issues (AFFA 1999). For this
purpose the federal government negotiated 56 regional planning regions
with management capacity to undertake evidence-based NRM planning
and to identify key priority projects for funding. These well-intentioned
federal programs had mixed results owing to governance confusion and
duplication of state efforts. While the federal audit office (e.g. ANAO
2008) emphasized the need to specify more tightly how federal funds were
expended, the federal programs were essentially complementary to state
efforts and did not attempt to integrate with them. Funding uncertain-
ties and periodic shifts in federal priorities undermined local morale and
effective collaboration (Head 2009; Robins and Kanowski 2011).
3. Greenhouse gas reduction and climate change response

Awareness of greenhouse gas reduction as a strategic policy issue for
national action was slow to develop in Australia. The issue has remained
contentious in recent years despite Australia’s willingness to accept inter-
national obligations under both Labor and Conservative governments.
State governments also developed a range of measures to assist in reduc-
tion of greenhouse gases, such as restrictions on massive land clearing
in rural areas and incentives to reward energy efficiency. However, the
main policy levers to influence corporate behaviour always resided with
the federal government. A prescriptive and regulatory approach had no
political support, so the policy instruments selected were a mix of direct
incentives and market-based mechanisms. Given the prominent role of
the coal-mining sector in Australia, both for domestic power genera-
tion and for lucrative exports into the rapidly growing Asian economies,
Conservative governments tended to favour subsidies to industry for
switching to energy-efficient practices. The federal government of Prime
Minister Howard (1996–2007) also developed a grants program to encour-
age adaptation to climate change, with an emphasis on robust infrastruc-
ture and better emergency management in response to climate variability
and extreme weather events. The main debate from 2007 was about the
role of a carbon pricing scheme to encourage new investment in alternative
energy sources. Howard appointed an expert taskforce that recommended
a trading scheme in 2007, and the new Labor government of Prime
Minister Rudd established a major review by economist Ross Garnaut,
modelled in part on the UK’s Stern Report, which had argued for the
benefits of early action. The Garnaut review recommended an emissions

trading scheme (Garnaut 2008) and a bill was passed in the lower house
of parliament in 2009 but blocked in the Senate by an unlikely combina-
tion of Conservatives and Greens. The fragile bipartisanship concerning a
market-based mechanism for carbon pricing collapsed in 2009, although a
revised legislative scheme was passed in 2011 for implementation in 2012
(Beeson and McDonald 2013). A new Conservative government in 2013
abolished the federal agencies focused on climate change, and abolished
the emissions trading scheme entirely, while maintaining a grants program
for energy efficiency. The scientific evidence base, identifying the scope of
climate change problems and related needs for policy change, was quickly
discounted in the partisan politics that were rekindled after 2009.
Outcomes and Implications
The Australian government’s attempts to address these major policy

challenges in environmental and natural resource management required
an increased commitment to strategic policy intervention in these areas.
The federal role began, first, by attempting more systematic coordination
across levels of government and across departmental boundaries; and,
second, by providing greater investments in scientific research and systems
for monitoring and evaluation. Over time, the government explored other
options – grants programs, high-level inquiries and market-based trading
instruments. The timeframes for influencing NRM and environmental
outcomes are long term, and the five-yearly State of the Environment
report indicates few, if any, matters of measurable improvement over the
last two decades. The difficulties of reversing such trends in NRM systems
are well known and widely understood. In the specific case of climate
change policy, greenhouse gas reduction targets have been modest and
the achievements over the last two decades are more akin to stabilization
rather than transformative new directions.
Nevertheless, some of the building blocks have been put in place to
enable future progress in a number of NRM and environmental fields.
The extent of progress will depend on several factors. Political leader-
ship is necessary, to provide authorization and encouragement for the
public bureaucracy to seek creative and collaborative solutions, as envis-
aged in the various APS innovation documents outlined above. Ideally,
the processes and forums for developing long-term approaches would
allow bipartisan support to consolidate broad directions and lessen the
risk of chaotic policy switches. Collaboration across agencies and across
levels of government is necessary for developing and implementing the
broad packages of goals and programs to tackle the wicked problems of
NRM. Processes to allow pools of shared funding, with shared goals and

a ccountabilities, have been envisaged (DFD 2012) but progress in imple-

menting such arrangements in risk-averse cultures has been glacial.
CONCLUSIONS: BUILDING POLICY CAPACITY AND

GOOD GOVERNANCE
The task of reforming the machinery of the public service, improving the
capacities of the workforce, and simultaneously rethinking the strategic
frameworks necessary for tackling major long-term policy challenges, has
constituted a massive contemporary tension at the heart of APS govern-
ance. With the increased contestability in sources of policy advice that
emerged as part of the NPM reforms, and an associated risk that the
policy capacities of core departments would be undermined, some addi-
tional sources of policy capacity and review have been built alongside the
standard advisory activities of the core public service agencies. As in other
countries, there have been some limited moves to reassert central steering
on major policy issues (Dahlström et al. 2011). In the Australian case this
was exemplified when the newly elected federal government in 2013, as
one of its first acts of governing, pulled all Indigenous programs into the
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
An example of this return to central steering has been the use of special
taskforces, generally steered and coordinated by central agencies such as the
Treasury or the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. These task-
forces have investigated long-term structural issues, and led to a number of
valuable reports, for example, on the implications of an ageing population
(Department of Treasury 2010), the challenges of Australia’s future pros-
perity within the Asia-Pacific region (DPMC 2012), and a major review of
taxation (Henry 2010). Unfortunately, these strategic documents tend to be
seen as associated with the government of the day, and are often devalued
by an incoming government with different priorities and preconceptions.
A second important strategic policy option for the federal government
has been to refer a number of key issues each year to the Productivity
Commission. Formed in 1998 from an amalgamation of policy research
entities, the Productivity Commission is a statutory public body dedicated
to undertaking strategic policy inquiries as requested by the government
(Banks 2010). The value of such a body lies in a combination of factors that
underpin its unique status: its professional reputation for strong analysis;
its open inquiry and submissions process; and its hard-won enjoyment
of bipartisan support within the national parliament. The Commission
has produced a large number of reports covering key topics on economic
productivity, social policy reform and better management of environmen-

tal assets (Productivity Commission 2013). It has also provided invaluable

support for two COAG steering groups on comparative services provision
and on Indigenous strategies for ‘closing the gap’.
A third source of strategic direction has focused on better performance
monitoring in the complex field of intergovernmental services agree-
ments. A large part of public expenditure is covered by such agreements,
which include reporting requirements in relation to agreed performance
benchmarks. The COAG Reform Council was established in 2004 to
provide oversight of progress in the implementation of policy reforms
and programs agreed by the prime minister and the premiers. The Reform
Council focuses on the outcomes and performance benchmarks specified
in national agreements, offering critical commentary on an ambitious
and sometimes overcrowded agenda of policy changes to improve service
efficiency and effectiveness (COAG Reform Council 2014). The Reform
Council’s reporting against Closing the Gap has been a prime example
of its ability to weigh up the successes and challenges of intergovernment
agreements that attempt to address wicked policy challenges. The COAG
Reform Council was disbanded in 2014 by the Abbott federal government.
As we have shown here, building the capacity for addressing wicked
problems is a complex business. Through exploring two cases we have
highlighted that, whilst government may seek more collaborative and
cooperative approaches both within its own boundaries but also across
them into other sectors and with the community, its ability to do so is
limited by seemingly immovable commitment to operating in a program-
matic and bureaucratic fashion. Report after report has pointed to these
tendencies as impediments to new ways of working, yet they persist and
constrain attempts to address wicked policy challenges. It is difficult to see
how substantial progress can be made without serious attempts at struc-
tural and cultural transformation of the model of governing in Australia.
Our cases show, however, that incremental change is possible in some
areas of these policy domains. Moving attention to the next stage, and
fast-tracking progress, however, requires a fundamental rethinking of the
way in which governments operate within and across their boundaries.
NOTES
1. Altman et al. (2008) present two sets of estimates: one for convergence based on long-
run trends since 1971, and another for convergence based on post-1996 trends (see p. 13).
We present estimates from the 1971 set unless indicated otherwise (*). They assume no
radical change in policy settings. It is important to note that, whilst they acknowledge
severe data issues, they work with the best-case scenarios.
2. For more information see http://www.atns.net.au/agreement.asp?EntityID5618.

REFERENCES
Adger, W.N. and A. Jordan (eds) (2009), Governing Sustainability, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
AFFA (Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry Australia) (1999), ‘Managing natural resources in
rural Australia for a sustainable future’. Discussion Paper, Canberra: AFFA.
AGRAGA (Advisory Group on the Reform of Australian Government Administration)
(2010), Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government
Administration, Canberra: Department of the Prime Minster and Cabinet.
Altman, J., N. Biddle and B. Hunter (2008), The Challenge of ‘Closing the Gap’ in
Indigenous Socioeconomic Outcomes, Canberra: Australian National University, Centre
for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2007), Whole of Government Indigenous Service
Delivery Arrangements, Audit Report No. 10, Canberra: ANAO.
ANAO (Australian National Audit Office) (2008), Regional Service Delivery Model for the
Natural Heritage Trust and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. Audit
Report No. 21, Canberra: ANAO.
APSC (Australian Public Service Commission) (2003), ‘The Australian experience of public
sector reform’, Occasional Paper 2, Canberra: APSC.
APSC (Australian Public Service Commission) (2007a), Changing Behaviour: A Public Policy
Perspective, Discussion Paper, Canberra: APSC.
APSC (Australian Public Service Commission) (2007b), ‘Tackling wicked problems: a public
policy perspective’, Discussion Paper, Canberra: APSC.
Banks, G. (2010), An Economy- Wide View: Speeches on Structural Reform, Canberra:
Productivity Commission.
Beeson, M. and M. McDonald (2013), ‘The politics of climate change in Australia’,
Australian Journal of Politics and History, 59(3), 331–48.
Bouckaert, G. and J. Halligan (2008), Managing Performance: International Comparisons,
London: Routledge.
Campbell, A. (1994), Landcare: Communities Shaping the Land and its Future, Sydney:
Allen & Unwin.
Carroll, P. and M. Painter (eds) (1995), Microeconomic Reform and Federalism, Canberra:
Federalism Research Centre, Australian National University.
Clark, C. and D. Corbett (eds) (1999), Reforming the Public Sector: Problems and Solutions,
Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
COAG (Council of Australian Governments) (2008), National Indigenous Reform Agreement
(Closing the Gap), Canberra: Council of Australian Governments.
COAG Reform Council (2013), Indigenous Reform 2011–12: Comparing Performance
across Australia, report to the Council of Australian Governments, Sydney: Council of
Australian Governments.
COAG Reform Council (2014), COAG Reform Agenda, at https://www.coagreformcouncil.
gov.au/agenda.
Collard, K.S., H.A. D’Antoine, D.G. Eggington, B.R. Henry, A.C. Martin and G.H.
Mooney (2005), ‘Mutual obligation in Indigenous health: can shared responsibility agree-
ments be truly mutual?’, The Medical Journal of Australia, 182(10), 502–4.
Crase, L. (ed.) (2008), Water Policy in Australia: The Impact of Change and Uncertainty,
London: Earthscan.
Curtis, A. and D. Lockwood (2000), ‘Landcare and catchment management in Australia’,
Society & Natural Resources, 13(1), 61–73.
Dahlström, C., B.G. Peters and J. Pierre (eds) (2011), Steering from the Centre: Strengthening
Davis, G. and P. Weller (eds) (2001), Are You Being Served? States, Citizens and Governance,
Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Department of Environment (2011), Australia State of the Environment 2011, report
of the independent SOE committee, Canberra: Department of Environment. http://

www.environment.gov.au/topics/science-and-research/state-environment-reporting/
soe-2011.
Department of Treasury (2010), Intergenerational Report 2010, Canberra: Treasury.
DFD (Department of Finance and Deregulation) (2012), ‘Sharpening the focus: a framework
for improving Commonwealth performance’, Commonwealth Financial Accountability
Review Position Paper, Canberra: DFD.
Dovers, S.R. and S. Wild River (eds) (2003), Managing Australia’s Environment, Sydney:
Federation Press.
DPMC (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) (2012), Australia in the Asian
Century: White Paper, Canberra: DPMC.
Dunleavy, P. and C. Hood (1994), ‘From old public administration to new public manage-
ment’, Public Money & Management, 14(3), 9–16.
Fenna, A. and R. Hollander (2013), ‘Dilemmas of federalism and the dynamics of the
Australian case’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 72(3), 220–27.
Forsyth, P. (ed.) (1992), Microeconomic Reform in Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Garnaut, R. (2008), Report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review, Canberra: Climate
Change Review. http://www.garnautreview.org.au/2008-review.html.
Government 2.0 Taskforce (2009), Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0, Canberra:
Department of Finance and Deregulation.
Halligan, J. and J. Power (1992), Political Management in the 1990s, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press.
’t Hart, P. (2010), ‘Lifting its game to get ahead: the Canberra bureaucracy’s reform by
stealth’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, July, online at http://www.australianreview.
net/digest/2010/07/thart.html.
Head, B.W. (2008), ‘Wicked problems in public policy’, Public Policy, 3(2), 101–18.
Head, B.W. (2009), ‘From government to governance: explaining and assessing new
approaches to NRM’, in M.B. Lane, C. Robinson and B. Taylor (eds), Contested Country:
Local and Regional Natural Resource Management in Australia, Melbourne: CSIRO
Publishing, pp. 15–28.
Head, B.W. (2010), ‘How can the public sector resolve complex issues? Strategies for steer-
ing, administering and coping’, Asia Pacific Journal of Business Administration, 2(1), 8–16.
Head, B.W. and J. Alford (2015), ‘Wicked problems: implications for public policy and man-
agement’, Administration and Society (available online 28 March 2013).
Henry, K. (2010), Australia’s Future Tax System. Final Report (chair Ken Henry), Canberra:
Department of Treasury.
Hussey, K. and S.R. Dovers (eds) (2007), Managing Water for Australia: The Social and
Institutional Challenges, Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing.
Industry Commission (1996), Competitive Tendering and Contracting by Public Sector
Agencies, Canberra: Industry Commission.
KPMG (2007), Evaluation of Indigenous Coordination Centers: Final Report, Canberra:
KPMG International.
Lindquist, E. (2010), ‘From rhetoric to blueprint: the Moran Review as a concerted, com-
prehensive and emergent strategy for public service reform’, Australian Journal of Public
Lindquist, E., S. Vincent and J. Wanna (eds) (2011), Delivering Policy Reform: Anchoring
Significant Reform in Turbulent Times, Canberra: ANU e-Press.
MAC (Management Advisory Committee) (2004), Connecting Government: Whole of
Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges, Canberra: Department of the
Prime Minister and Cabinet.
MAC (Management Advisory Committee) (2010), Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation
in the Australian Public Service, Canberra: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
McCausland, R. (2005), ‘Shared responsibility agreements: practical reconciliation or pater-
nalistic rhetoric?’, Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6(12), 9–11.
Moran, T. (2013), ‘Reforming to create value: our next five strategic directions’, Australian
Journal of Public Administration, 72(1), 1–6.

Morgan Disney & Associates Pty Ltd (2006), A Red Tape Evaluation in Selected Indigenous
Communities: Final Report for the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination, Canberra:
Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination.
O’Flynn, J. (2014), ‘Crossing boundaries: the fundamental questions in public manage-
ment and policy’, in J. O’Flynn, D. Blackman and J. Halligan (eds), Crossing Boundaries
in Public Management and Policy: The International Experience, London: Routledge,
pp. 11–44.
O’Flynn, J., D. Blackman and J. Halligan (eds) (2014), Crossing Boundaries in Public
Management and Policy: The International Experience, New York: Routledge.
O’Flynn, J., F. Buick, D. Blackman and J. Halligan (2011), ‘You win some, you lose some:
experiments with joined-up government’, International Journal of Public Administration,
34(4), 244–54.
Painter, M. (1998), Collaborative Federalism: Economic Reform in Australia in the 1990s,
Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert (2011), Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis,
3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prime Minister of Australia (2010), Closing the Gap: Prime Minister’s Report 2010, Canberra:
Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister of Australia (2013), Closing the Gap: Prime Minister’s Report 2013, Canberra:
Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister of Australia (2014), Closing the Gap: Prime Minister’s Report 2014,
Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Productivity Commission (2012), 2012 Indigenous Expenditure Report, Canberra:
Productivity Commission.
Productivity Commission (2013), Annual Report 2012–13, Canberra: Productivity
Commission. http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/128438/annual-report-
2012-13.pdf.
Quiggin, J., T. Mallawaarachchi and S. Chambers (eds) (2012), Water Policy Reform: Lessons
in Sustainability from the Murray–Darling Basin, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton,
MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Rittel, H.W.J. and M.M. Webber (1973), ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, Policy
Sciences, 4(2), 155–69.
Robins, L. and P. Kanowski (2011), ‘“Crying for our country”: eight ways in which “Caring
for our country” has undermined Australia’s regional model for natural resource manage-
ment’, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 18(2), 88–108.
SGIA (Secretaries’ Group on Indigenous Affairs) (2005), Annual Report on Indigenous Affairs
2004–05. Canberra, Australia: Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination, Department of
Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Canberra: Commonwealth of
Australia.
Shergold, P. (2004), ‘Connecting government: whole of government responses to Australia’s
priority challenges’, speech to launch the report of the Department of the Prime Minister
and Cabinet, 20 April.
Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision (2003), Overcoming
Indigenous disadvantage: Key Indicators 2003 Overview, Canberra: Commonwealth of
Australia.
Weller, P. (1996), ‘Commonwealth-state reform processes: a policy management review’,
Australian Journal of Public Administration, 55(1), 95–110.

16. The state and perceptions of public
sector reform in Europe
Dion Curry, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Sebastian
Jilke and Steven Van de Walle
INTRODUCTION
As in most other areas of the world, the public sector in Europe has
undergone significant reform in the past two decades, shaped in part by a
broader new public management (NPM) paradigm, but one that also intro-
duces a unique European flavour. Whilst NPM and public administration
in Europe share similarities with other cases, differing starting points and
the EU layer provide interesting insights into the nature of public sector
reforms from a broader comparative perspective. This chapter will draw
on a large-scale survey of top European executives in central government
in order to develop a more comprehensive and comparative picture of
NPM reforms and their effects over the last five years. Focusing on a
cross-section of nine EU countries plus Norway, the chapter will present
findings on reform initiatives, relevance of different reform trends and
their general success and impact within the case countries.
The chapter will first provide a general overview of the state of public
administration and the public sector in the European countries under
study before turning to how the public sector and its reform are per-
ceived by top executives. This latter investigation will focus on key trends
in public sector reform in terms of both NPM and post-NPM reforms
such as outcome/result orientation, downsizing, contracting out, cutting
red tape, transparency and openness, cooperation, digital/e-government,
citizen participation and others. The chapter will look at the importance
of these trends in the selected countries before examining the nature of
these reforms. Finally, the perceived success and overall impact of these
reforms will be assessed, along with a brief examination of the impacts of
the fiscal crisis on reforms in Europe. Throughout, the chapter will explore
similarities and differences in these issues across the European countries
under study, before providing some conclusions about the state of the
public sector, its reform and prospects for its future from a European
perspective.
369

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND THE PUBLIC

SECTOR IN EUROPE: A GENERAL OVERVIEW
The public sector in Europe has always drawn on a diverse set of starting
points in terms of ideals, wealth and breadth. NPM-style reforms have also
moved at different times, paces and extents through Europe. While the UK
was at the forefront of such reforms, countries on the continent, especially
southern European countries and the post-communist states, were slower
to adopt change. In all countries, these changes came about through
various combinations of necessity, learning and innovation, ability and
will. At the base of any public sector reform in Europe lie different and
often competing traditions of public administration. Napoleonic traditions
in many of the southern European countries (Ongaro, 2009) come from a
very different starting point from the former communist states in terms
of both what the public sector should do and how it should do it. Anglo-
Saxon and Scandinavian models also add to the mix. The EU has also
acted to shape the nature of reform, especially through accession criteria
for new member states. Reforms to these traditions have then been driven
by political will or a lack thereof, with some countries having politicians
with clear and distinct driving ambitions for the public sector, whereas
in other countries reforms have been more piecemeal and less ideologi-
cally driven. Political will is often also shaped by the power of the trade
unions representing the public sector, which in turn affects the nature and
extent of reform. Finally, the economic boom of the 1990s and the current
economic crisis have necessitated changes in direction and approach.
While classic NPM issues are still relevant to any discussion of the state
of the public sector and its future reform, in recent years other factors have
risen in importance. Questions of civic engagement through forms such as
digital and e-governance have become more important with technological
and ideational shifts (Dunleavy et al., 2006). Along with this, there is more
emphasis on making public management more transparent and account-
able, potentially opening it to new public and private actors. At the same
time, within the public sector there has been an increasing prevalence
of cooperation and collaboration in many different directions (O’Leary
and Blomgren Bingham, 2009). A more bottom–up approach has been
championed in some public sector approaches as either a positive way
to engage governments and citizens ‘on the ground’, or as an attempt to
download services and costs to lower levels of government. There has also
been a consolidation of public services as a way of improving efficiency
and streamlining public services. These factors all create a complex stew
of factors that act differently in diverse country contexts to both drive and
impede reform in European countries.

Public sector reform in Europe 371
THE CASE COUNTRIES
The case countries cover a broad swathe of European countries and

provide a comprehensive picture of how public sector reforms have taken
root in different European contexts. The sample is drawn from countries
of varying economic, social and political conditions, as well as covering
both traditionally ‘West’ and ‘East’ countries, and both northern and
southern European countries. The case countries include Austria, Estonia,
France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and
the UK.
Administrative reform in Austria has been an integral part of most
government programmes over the last decades and frequently described
as a never-ending story. The influx and rise of a more managerial agenda
started in the late 1980s/early 1990s (1989–1993) with a relatively com-
prehensive public management reform project that was later succeeded
by administrative innovation programmes with a similar managerial
emphasis (Hammerschmid and Meyer, 2005). These programmes included
a commitment to efficiency and cost-saving, corporatization, customer
orientation, modern personnel management, management instruments
and performance measurement mostly implemented in the form of small-
scale projects. With a fundamental political change in 2000 that brought
a nearly 60-year period of social-democratic government involvement to
an end, public sector reforms strongly gained momentum. A large number
of corporatizations, in addition to civil service system reforms and other
restructuring of the machinery of government, played an important role
in this phase, which culminated in a prominent ‘Austrian convent’ (2003–
2005) for fundamental state and administrative reform. However, this had
only very modest outcomes in administrative practice. More recent years
have been marked by far-reaching budgetary reform in 2007 and a strong
e-government agenda that has put Austria in a top position in the EU
e-government benchmark. The budget reform resulted in a government-
wide change towards outcome-based budgeting and accrual accounting,
as well as other key elements of a performance management logic that
came into force in 2013.
In Estonia, reforms started after the country regained its independence
from the Soviet Union in 1991. There were three main periods of public
sector reform. In the first period after transition (1991–96), broad reforms
were carried out and privatization, regulation and de-monopolization
all occurred. In the lead-up to EU accession (1996–2004), more specific
reforms took place to meet EU accession criteria and address issues such
as transparency, accountability and accessibility of services. Post EU
accession (2004 to the present), Estonian public service reform has been

disjointed, although some NPM-style reforms have taken place, such as

harmonizing public and private working conditions. In general, Estonia
has been amenable to NPM reforms, and regularly uses tools such as con-
tracting out and performance-based indicators. It is also widely recognized
for its e-government reforms (Savi and Metsma, 2013).
In France, public service reforms have occurred slowly and have been
relatively resistant to NPM- style reforms (Rouban, 2008; Pollitt and
Bouckaert, 2011). France’s limited application and slow roll-out of NPM
public administration reforms in the 1980s and 1990s have given it a con-
siderably different outlook on the role and values of public administration
compared to other countries in the study. However, France’s approach to
public administration did evolve, but more incrementally and selectively
than in other countries. This may be due in part to the Napoleonic tradi-
tions still valued in France, and the high degree of centralization of the
French state. In the 1980s, reforms in France first favoured decentraliza-
tion over efficiency or managerial reform, but did address some NPM
issues such as service quality, user concerns and various management
reforms. Throughout the 1990s, NPM policy instruments and tools were
increasingly used in the French public service. The main reforms were in
the area of budgetary processes, introducing tools such as programme-
oriented budgets, an increased emphasis on performance management
and new accountability measures. Under Sarkozy in 2007, there was also
a General Public Policy Review intended to look at efficient use of objec-
tives, instruments and implementation, again drawing from NPM-style
ideas. This led to rather far-reaching reforms under Sarkozy’s govern-
ment, which have substantially altered the French public service, moving it
away from Napoleonic ideas of centrality and uniformity and introducing
more performance management techniques. In contrast, approaches such
as agencification have occurred to a much lesser – and less systematic –
extent in France (Bezes and Jeannot, 2013).
In Germany, public administration reform has been a recurring phe-
nomenon in which different strands or waves have been identified (Jann,
2003). While Germany in the 1960s espoused an ‘active’ state emphasizing
state planning and intervention as drivers for social and economic pro-
gress, this shifted in the 1980s and 1990s to a ‘lean’ state model stressing
privatization and public sector downsizing in line with NPM ideas. Since
the late 1990s, this shifted to the idea of an ‘activating’ state built on new
ways of engaging with society where the state guarantees public services,
but engages with private and third sectors for financing and delivering
these services. The government reform programmes initiated since 1998
clearly resemble both NPM and neo-Weberian ideas such as a professional
and flexible HRM, better public management based on modern manage-

ment instruments, structural changes (e.g. shared services, task reduction,

process orientation, customer service) and e-government. While many of
the reforms have taken up NPM ideas, Germany is considered as a late-
comer and is at a rather early stage of building a managerial state system
(Bouckaert and Halligan, 2008). The overall hesitant stance towards
administrative reform is due to several institutional factors. First, the
highly federalized nature of the German state severely limits the imposition
of centralized administrative reforms. This is coupled with a decentralized
power structure, functionally divided policy-making and implementation,
and a pronounced legalistic Rechtsstaat tradition with a deeply ingrained
civil service identity and ethos emphasizing formal processes, rules and
stability. Recent reform initiatives have now started to move towards
newer post-NPM ideas such as transparency and network-based solutions
(Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011), but these are still very much an evolution
of previous reforms, rather than a complete break into something new
(Hammerschmid et al., 2013b).
Hungary has also significantly reformed its public administration since
the fall of communism. A unitary state, it makes extensive use of both
ministries and agencies, with the former largely responsible for policy-
making and the latter responsible for implementing these policies. Since
1990, Hungary has undergone significant agencification, but these agen-
cies largely lacked any overarching structural or legal framework until
2006, when a law was enacted that set out the basic requirements of these
agencies as part of the larger government apparatus. Local governments
were responsible for a large amount of public service delivery as well, but
in 2011 many services, including health and education, were centralized.
A combination of a strong legislature responsible for many executive
functions, a high, two-thirds vote threshold for the change of many laws,
a strong system of checks and balances, a separate judicial administra-
tion and a strong network of ombudsmen created a system of ‘regulatory
impotence’ (Hajnal, 2010) that placed limits on what policy-makers could
do. Wide-sweeping administrative change has been undertaken since 2010
when the Viktor Orbán government secured a two-thirds majority in
Cabinet and thus was able to undertake significant reforms. These changes
have removed many of the checks and balances that previously directed
public administration in the country, and strengthened political and
hierarchical control over most facets of administration, partly as a way
of dealing with the financial crisis at the time. Ministries were overhauled
and replaced by eight ‘superministries’, regional agencies have come under
tighter central control, local government power has been reduced and
bureaucratic recruitment is now controlled more hierarchically (Hajnal,
2013).

In Italy, the administrative systems and structures have been relatively

unstable over the last 20 years. New and old structures have been intro-
duced or changed in a sometimes overlapping fashion without improving
their stability. The administrative situation has also been affected by the
changing political landscape, with centre–right and centre–left coali-
tions treating administrative needs differently, and the installation of a
technical government in 2011/12. Italy’s attitudes towards Europe have
altered the administrative landscape in both normal and austerity-era
politics and policy. Whilst the centre–left largely abided by EU standards,
the centre–right coalition was more willing to break from these, but the
debt crisis in the country has pushed EU institutions into playing a more
prominent role in public management reform in the country. While Italy
has long displayed some patterns of ‘southern’ public administration, such
as clientelism and a certain absence of an administrative elite, reform in
the early 1990s has allowed for the development of a more autonomous
administrative body and the introduction of NPM-style ideas. Relations
between government and the bureaucracy were brought more in line with
the private sector in terms of employment conditions and performance
management measures were introduced. Many reforms related to public
service employment conditions, with further reforms increasing transpar-
ency of contracts and introducing further performance assessment meas-
ures. However, other issues have remained relatively unchanged, including
political appointments to middle- level civil service positions and the
centrality of trade unions in issues related to public service employment
practices. Interestingly, NPM-style reforms have taken place in one policy
area – health care – to a much greater extent than in any other policy area
(Ongaro et al., 2013).
In the Netherlands, the central government is mostly responsible for
policy-making tasks, with executive and implementation tasks undertaken
by agencies or local levels of government (although financed centrally).
Dutch politics is consensual, and, as a result, ministries are relatively open
to hearing external viewpoints from opposition parties, science and indus-
try, but ministers retain ultimate responsibility for decisions. Although it
has a unitary system, the Netherlands mostly avoids centralized govern-
ment, and this is reflected in administrative reforms. For the most part,
these reforms have aimed to slim down central government by devolving
more tasks to agencies and local levels. NPM-type reforms such as results-
based budgeting and performance measurement have been used, with a
move to private sector style approaches undertaken in the 1980s. This
slowed in the 1990s due to an easing of financial pressures and a desire to
return to the ‘primacy of politics’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 291).
Under the second Balkenende government starting in 2003, reforms were

also undertaken at the state level, focusing on quality of services, savings

on overhead costs and reducing the administrative burden of governments
(Van Twist et al., 2009, p. 32). At the central level, there was also a push to
reduce the administrative burden and bureaucracy, improve organization,
clarify central government tasks and develop e-government approaches
(Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011, p. 296). While efficiency was a goal of this
reform, it was more focused on reducing budgets and not on reducing the
size of the civil service. Since 2007, reforms have focused on the central
level of government, again looking to improve efficiency by promoting
cooperation between departments and reducing fragmentation, but now
also by reducing staff (Luts et al., 2008, p. 41; Van de Walle et al., 2013).
Norway features a large civil service due mainly to its universal welfare
state, and trust in government has been high while the effects of the finan-
cial crisis have been small. Although it is a unitary state, there is some
political and administrative decentralization. There are two ministerial
levels in the country, with relatively powerful sectoral ministries and
weaker supra-ministries that mainly play a coordination role between
ministries (Christensen, 2003). There is a strong local level of government,
and this level both develops and implements local-level policy and imple-
ments centrally decided policy. While economic strength and political
and administrative culture have largely dampened the effects of NPM
reforms in Norway, some changes have occurred in line with international
waves of NPM reform. In the mid-1980s there were moves to reform the
central level along some NPM-style lines, with more reform in the 1990s
under pressure from the OECD to pursue further change. However, these
reforms have not been consistent over time and tend to be piecemeal in
nature. They have focused mainly on efficiency aspects within the public
administration and have largely avoided other reforms such as privatiza-
tion or downsizing the state. There has also been a shift towards develop-
ing more autonomous agencies, with a move since the 1990s to create more
autonomous state-owned companies in many sectors, along with a greater
focus on NPM reforms within these bodies, such as performance measure-
ment and results-based budgeting. While these changes have increased
vertical coordination, there is little horizontal coordination across sectors.
In addition, the current government has attempted to roll back some of
these NPM reforms. However, there is disagreement within the governing
coalition about the state of the administration, resulting in a rebalanc-
ing rather than transformation of NPM reforms already implemented.
This has created a layered and hybridized form of public administration
combining old and new ideas (Christensen et al., 2007; Christensen and
Lægreid, 2011; Lægreid et al., 2013).
Public administration reform in Spain has been undertaken both to get

rid of Franco-style public administration ideals and also as an attempt

to modernize the public sector. Starting from a broad Napoleonic tradi-
tion, Spanish reform in the late 1970s focused on reducing bureaucracy
and red tape by reorganizing administrative and ministerial bodies. In the
1980s, the focus shifted to decentralization with the creation of regional
governments and regulation of local governments. A greater emphasis
was placed on modernization in the 1990s as a way to improve relations
between the administration and citizens. This included NPM-type ideas
such as treating the citizen as a customer, streamlining administrative pro-
cedures and increasing the focus on efficiency, effectiveness and quality
of services. However, there was some resistance from senior executives
to certain NPM objectives, such as managerial autonomy, management
by objectives and a results-based focus, which limited the actual reform
that took place in the country. Since the late 1990s, Spain has had a clear
reform agenda with an NPM focus, aiming for a flexible and efficient
organizational structure, reform of administrative courts, new regulatory
frameworks for recruitment, efficiency and quality in service delivery,
and the incorporation of new technology in the process (Torres and Pina,
2004). Other post-NPM reforms have started to appear in the 2000s, such
as efforts to improve transparency and cooperation and collaboration
among different public bodies. Since the crisis, most reforms have been
driven by budgetary restrictions (Alonso and Clifton, 2013).
Finally, public administration reform has been a persistent theme in the
UK, albeit one that ebbs and flows. The extent of changes and the focus
on many private sector ideals in public administration have generally led
the UK to be seen as the ‘purest’ and most extensive form of NPM in
Europe. While this is true, the differences between the UK example and
other European cases should not be overstated (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2011). After the establishment of the welfare state and a gradual profes-
sionalization of the civil service, in the 1970s the focus moved to improv-
ing efficiency and effectiveness of public institutions, including a drastic
reorganization and reduction of local governments in 1974. After the eco-
nomic crises of the 1970s and the election of Thatcher in 1979, significant
NPM-style reform of the public sector was undertaken. Key goals were
to reduce the size of the public sector, open it to market forces and run
it more like a private sector business. The civil service, previously under
its own department, was put under control of the Treasury and business-
like arrangements such as target-based management and, in some cases,
performance-based pay were introduced. Compulsory competitive ten-
dering was launched at the local level, along with further competition in
providing public services. Tony Blair’s election in 1997 marked the begin-
ning of a ‘Third Way’ approach to balance the market, state and civil

society in providing services. This approach retained business-inspired

ideas such as performance measures and contracting out, while attempt-
ing to balance this with a top–down focus on continuous improvement
and target-based planning, along with a post-NPM aim to strengthen
relationships and coordination between the various actors in delivering
public services. This ‘Third Way’ approach left a public service driven
largely by the market and NPM- style public administration coupled
with a wilful effort to ‘steer’ the management of these disparate actors
at the central governmental level. Since the election of the Conservative/
Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, the focus of public administration
reform has been clearly on reducing costs and the size of the public sector
(Andrews et al., 2013).
FACTORS AFFECTING REFORM: GOAL

AMBIGUITY AND PUBLIC SECTOR AUTONOMY
The Survey
In 2012, a 31-question survey was sent electronically or via post to over

21 000 high-ranking civil servants in ten European countries. The survey’s
aim was threefold: (1) to capture perceptions on the current status of
management, coordination and administration reforms; (2) to gauge the
effects of NPM-style reforms on performance, values/identities, coordina-
tion and social cohesion; and (3) to examine the impact of the financial
crisis on public administration. The survey was sent to the entire popula-
tion of top-and medium-high-level civil servants in both ministries and
agencies in each country, translated into each country’s national language.
The overall response rate for the survey in the first ten countries was 23.7
per cent, with individual country response rates varying from 11.4 per
cent (UK) to 36.5 per cent (Austria). While the overall response rate is
somewhat low, it is consistent with other surveys of executives and in
each country at least 300 responses were recorded, with total responses
numbering 4814.1
As outlined above, many factors affect the ability of public sector
reform to be introduced, and in turn the success of these reforms hinges
on the public service’s ability to undertake them in an effective manner.
Two factors that have an impact on how easily managerial or NPM-type
reforms are implemented are the existence of clear and measurable goals,
and the autonomy of public sector executives or ‘managers’ in making
these and related changes without political interference.

Germany
France
Hungary
Italy
Norway
Average
Austria
Spain
Estonia
The Netherlands
United Kingdom
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Note: Aggregate mean for four items per country: 1 5 low goal ambiguity, 7 5 high goal
ambiguity.
Figure 16.1 Perceived goal ambiguity and measurability
Goal Ambiguity
Performance management and NPM-type reforms are best executed when

goals are limited, clearly stated and communicated, and easy to observe
and measure (Rainy and Jung, 2010). Based on the executives’ perception
of these four factors,2 a rather uniform and moderate degree of goal ambi-
guity is evident in all countries (see Figure 16.1). A slightly lower degree
of goal ambiguity is perceived in the UK, the Netherlands and Estonia,
indicating a somewhat greater openness of these countries to performance
management reforms. In contrast, Germany and France show a slightly
higher degree of goal ambiguity. As to be expected, managers of agencies
reported less goal ambiguity than managers in ministries.
There was also some variation between countries. Especially in
Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, executives had a much
more favourable view of whether their goals were clearly stated and com-
municated to staff, but that it was not so easy to observe and measure
activities related to these goals. While this existence of goal ambiguity
poses a challenge for many executives, the overall rather low degree does
not seem to make it a major barrier to introducing management tools and
concepts into public sector practices.

The Netherlands
Norway
Germany
Estonia
United Kingdom
Average
France
Austria
Hungary
Spain
Italy
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Note: Aggregate mean for eight items per country: 1 5 very low autonomy, 7 5 very high
autonomy.
Figure 16.2 Perceived degree of management and policy autonomy
Autonomy of Public Sector Executives
Increasing the autonomy of the public sector vis-à-vis political i nstitutions

– in other words, letting the managers manage – has been a major focus
of NPM-type reforms and has an impact on the nature and quality of
reform. Autonomy consists of both managerial autonomy (the ability to
make organizational and structural changes, as well as decisions on per-
sonnel, budget and contracting out) as well as policy autonomy (to design,
decide on and implement policies), and the extent to which public sector
institutions can make technical decisions free from political interference
will have an effect on reform. While some country executives felt they had
a high degree of autonomy (the Netherlands) with regard to these factors,
others felt a low degree of autonomy to manage or make decisions freely
(Italy) (see Figure 16.2).
In different countries, different types of autonomy were noted as being
either stronger or weaker by public sector executives. For instance, in the
UK, all forms of autonomy were perceived as higher than average, but
especially in allocating budgets, organizational structuring and imple-
mentation of policies. Autonomy of the public sector in the Netherlands
was perceived as high, and this applied across the board. Autonomy was
seen to be highest in managerial tasks and implementing policy, but, even

in designing and choosing policies, executives were mostly positive about

their levels of autonomy. In Norway, executives perceived higher levels
of autonomy in managerial issues such as hiring staff or organizational
structure, as well as policy implementation. However, they felt they had
lower autonomy in contracting out or choosing or designing policies.
Estonian executives perceived a high degree of autonomy in making
personnel decisions and implementing policy, but a much lower level in
terms of structuring the organization or contracting out services. This
was similar in Hungary, where the lowest level of autonomy was felt in
contracting out services, and the highest level in implementing policies.
Interestingly, in Germany, executives felt they had more autonomy in
choosing and designing policies compared to implementing these policies.
While their autonomy in choosing and designing policies was perceived as
significantly higher than average in the European countries studied, their
control over implementing the policies as well as management autonomy
was actually lower (Hammerschmid et al., 2013b).
In France, in contrast, where perceptions of autonomy were below
average, civil servants felt they had very little autonomy over recruitment,
budgeting decisions and, especially, firing staff. On the policy side, French
executives felt little autonomy in deciding on public policy decisions, but
more autonomy in implementing them. Different groups of executives also
felt different levels of control. While agency directors reported a high level
of autonomy, directors of interministerial units at the département level
felt they had little autonomy in most areas (Bezes and Jeannot, 2013).
Autonomy was perceived as particularly low in Italy and Spain. In
Spain, executives felt they had a low level of autonomy almost across the
board in both policy and managerial senses. Spanish results were well
below the European average in choosing and designing policies, imple-
menting policies, organizational structures, contracting out and allocating
budgets, and were particularly low in promoting, hiring or firing staff.
Italian executives perceived little autonomy over managerial decisions
such as hiring and dismissing staff, partly due to a heavily unionized
public sector, but on other measures of autonomy – budget reallocation,
contracting out, organizational and structural design and effecting policy
formulation and implementations – Italian executives perceived a level
of autonomy higher than the European average. There was a significant
sectoral difference in Italy, with those in the health care sector feeling they
had significantly greater autonomy across the board. Overall, though,
Italian executive autonomy was well below the European average (Ongaro
et al., 2013).
In addition to the degree of autonomy, another indicator of managers’
freedom in reform is the degree of politicization of the public sector. This

Spain
Austria
Italy
Hungary
Average
France
Estonia
Germany
United Kingdom
Norway
The Netherlands
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Note: Aggregate mean per country: 1 5 low degree of politicization, 7 5 high degree of
politicization.
Figure 16.3 Perceived degree of politicization based on three items
was measured with questions about whether politicians respect the techni-
cal expertise of the administration, whether they try to influence senior-
level appointments and whether they interfere in routine activities. When
aggregated, these factors of politicization show some variation across
Europe (Hammerschmid et al., 2013c) (see Figure 16.3).
Figure 16.3 shows that, unsurprisingly, those executives who felt they
had higher autonomy also perceived a lower degree of politicization. In
general, agency executives felt more autonomy than their ministry coun-
terparts. With regard to country differences, executives in the Netherlands
perceived the lowest level of politicization, with less interference from
political levels, non-politicized senior-level appointments and more politi-
cal respect for the technical expertise of executives. Executives in Norway
and the UK also showed a relatively positive perception of their auton-
omy, particularly in regard to the respect politicians have for the techni-
cal expertise of the administration, which was significantly higher than
the European average. Also, Estonia was found to have a relatively low
level of politicization of the public sector, which is in line with previous
research that shows that Estonia has among the lowest level of politi-
cal interference in the civil service among the new Central and Eastern
European EU countries (Meyer-Sahling, 2011). As a new democracy, the
political parties in the country have not yet developed the capacity to steer

public administration or become overly involved, and the small size of

the country also means that there is less capacity to develop overlapping
political and bureaucratic functions (Randma-Liiv, 2002).
In contrast, countries such as Spain, Italy and Austria showed a rather
high level of politicization. Spanish executives had the highest perception
of political interference, especially in influencing senior-level appoint-
ments and in instigating reforms, whereas executives at the same time do
not feel that politicians interfere with day-to-day activities.
KEY TRENDS IN EUROPEAN PUBLIC SECTOR

REFORM
As the countries analysed are rather diverse, it is interesting to note

both similarities and differences in public sector reform across national
contexts. NPM as a rather broad label encompasses several ideas and
concepts, such as performance measurement, results orientation or con-
tracting out and privatization. In addition, in recent years post-NPM
ideas such as transparency, e-government and collaboration have also
begun to take root in different national contexts. The relevance of these
different facets of NPM and post-NPM reforms were assessed by top
public executives and provide interesting insights into how well NPM
is performing and has taken hold in various countries and Europe as a
whole. It also provides an understanding of whether these NPM reforms
have been increasingly supplanted or replaced by post-NPM ideas, as
often argued in public administration literature.
The next three sections of this chapter will examine the perceptions
of top public executives of public sector reform in their policy field over
the last five years. First, it will examine perceptions on the importance of
these reforms, before looking at the nature of these changes in terms of
their approach. Finally, assessments of the success of these reforms will be
examined. General trends can be observed, but specific examples will also
be drawn from the case countries.
IMPORTANCE OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF REFORM
Public administration reform trends address different issues and have very
different goals and trajectories. While traditional NPM reforms focus on
issues such as contracting out, privatization and performance manage-
ment, post-NPM ideas have placed greater emphasis on factors such as
coordination and cooperation, transparency and citizen participation.

1
Digital or Collaboration Transparency Public sector Focusing on Internal Treatment of External
e-government and cooperation and open downsizing outcomes and bureaucracy service users as partnerships
among different government results reduction/ customers and strategic
public sector cutting red tape alliances
actors
1
Flexible Mergers of Citizen Contracting Extending state Creation of Privatisation
employment government participation out provision into new autonomous
organisations methods/initiatives areas agencies or
corporatization
Notes:
Q: How important are the following reform trends in your policy area? 1 5 Not at all, 7 5
To a large extent.
The graph depicts overall average plus highest/lowest country average; the solid line
indicates the average for all reform trends.
Figure 16.4 Importance of reform trends
After 20 years of NPM in the public eye, perceptions of NPM- style

reforms still differ on whether these reforms are, in fact, necessary, and
how important they are; the focus of public sector modernization over the
last 20 years has also shifted and now often incorporates post-NPM ideas
as well.
The results of the survey are revealing in showing an increased rel-
evance of post-NPM reforms, while many NPM-style reforms have lost
relevance (see Figure 16.4). Overall, digital/e-government, public sector

collaboration and cooperation, transparency and open government are

currently the most important reform trends. The main wave of NPM-type
reforms such as privatization, agencification/corporatization or contract-
ing out seems to be over and increasingly superseded by a new agenda
of partnership-and network- oriented government arrangements and
reforms. The effects of the fiscal crisis are clearly visible in European
public administration, with a high relevance of public sector downsizing,
outcome and result orientation and the reduction of internal bureaucracy.
In certain areas there was significant variation between countries.
This was especially true in relation to public sector downsizing, a sig-
nificantly important trend in countries such as the UK, France, Estonia
and the Netherlands, but least important in Norway, where executives
rated it a full point less important than the next-lowest country (Italy).
There was also a large difference in how important a focus on outcomes
and results was in each country: it was much more important in more
managerial countries like the UK and the Netherlands, but less impor-
tant in Spain, France and Italy. Flexible employment, privatization and
transparency and open government also see significant cross- country
variation. Transparency and open government are important throughout,
although France remains somewhat of an outlier, with French executives
rating it as much less important than executives from all other countries.
Digital/e-
government, collaboration/cooperation among public sector
actors and customer orientation are all seen as important and show high
consistency across countries.
In specific countries, there was also some variation in the comparative
importance of these trends. Norwegian officials are mostly in line with
the overall assessment and tend to see higher relevance in post-NPM
reforms, often to a greater extent than the overall average. Transparent
and open government and e-government are seen as most pertinent, but
a focus on outcomes and results is also regarded as important. Although
these officials saw collaboration and cooperation among different public
actors as important, this was not reflected as clearly in actual practice, as
vertical coordination is strong but horizontal coordination remains weak
in Norway (Fimreite and Lægreid, 2009). The largest differences between
Norway and the rest of the Europe were in the area of public sector
downsizing, where only 25 per cent of Norwegian executives saw this as
important compared to 70 per cent of the overall population (Lægreid
et al., 2013).
The Netherlands also shows a mix in perceived importance between
NPM and post-NPM reform trends. Collaboration and cooperation and
transparency and open government are both seen as highly important, as
is a focus on outcome and results. Privatization was seen to be the least

important reform factor, along with agencification. Although the country

pursued these strategies in the past, these are now seen as less important.
In the UK, a focus on outcomes and results, public sector downsizing,
e-government, transparency and external partnerships all received high
scores in terms of importance. Privatization, agencification and the
extension of state provision were deemed the least important in terms of
reform. Transparency and open government and especially the develop-
ment of external partnerships were more important in the UK than in
Europe on average, while the extension of state provision was lower than
average.
In Germany, NPM-style reform trends are not seen as overly impor-
tant, with a majority finding reforms such as privatization, contracting
out and agencification to be of low importance. However, some NPM-
related trends were seen to be more relevant, with downsizing perceived
as the most important, followed by a focus on outcomes and results,
customer orientation and the cutting of red tape. Post-NPM trends such
as e-government and transparency & open government were all seen as
important by a majority of executives. In general, the German case was in
line with other European countries, though, which belies the conception
of Germany as lagging behind other countries in terms of public sector
reform (Hammerschmid et al., 2013b).
French executives had a different perception of reform trends compared
to other countries in many areas. Transparency, open government and
citizen participation, along with flexible employment, contracting out and
external partnerships, were all seen as relatively less important. While the
relevance of downsizing measures and organizational mergers were seen
as high, this was not equated to privatization, where only 9 per cent of
executives felt this was highly relevant. Hungarian executives saw rather
low relevance of many NPM-style reforms, most notably privatization,
but also agencification and contracting out. However, downsizing was
seen as one of the most relevant types of reform, along with a focus on citi-
zens as customers. The importance of NPM reforms was also somewhat
less developed in Spain, especially as regards agencification and customer
orientation, which were lower than the European average. The reforms
seen as most important were public sector downsizing, e-government and
transparent and open government.
In Italy, the perceptions of importance of various reform trends were
quite different from actual government priorities in these areas. Executives
perceived that e-government, enhancing transparency and open govern-
ment and citizen participation were important reform initiatives, but these
had not been singled out at the governmental level. The importance of pri-
vatization and contracting out was also significantly higher in Italy than

in Europe on average. This was even higher in the health sector, showing
that NPM-style reforms have probably hit that sector the most (Ongaro
et al., 2013).
THE NATURE OF REFORM IMPLEMENTATION

Overall views on the success of public sector reform are obviously impor-
tant. Executives were asked their perceptions of reform dynamics based on
ten different scales, as depicted in Table 16.1.
While some factors – such as top–down reform and an emphasis on
cost-cutting and savings versus service improvement – were confirmed in
nearly all countries, interesting differences were also noted in some coun-
tries. Executives in Norway tended to have a more positive view of reforms
across the spectrum, seeing them as more consistent, comprehensive and
substantial than the average. In addition, they saw them as more bottom–
up, less contested by unions and more open to public involvement. The
situation was clearly more negative in France, where most executives felt
that the reforms were too demanding, contested by the unions, driven
by the crisis and mainly implemented without public involvement. In
Germany, more public sector executives than the European average
felt that reforms were not demanding enough, which fits with previous
research on Germany’s incremental approach to public sector reform.
This is also supported when compared to results in other countries.
German executives perceived reforms to be more inconsistent, partial and
symbolic than other countries, indicating more reticence to fast and com-
prehensive reform (Hammerschmid et al., 2013b). However, perceptions
Table 16.1 Public sector reforms
Public sector reforms in my policy area tend to . . .

Be too demanding Be not demanding enough
Be unsuccessful Be successful
Have no public involvement Have high public involvement
Be about cost-cutting and savings Be about service improvement
Be contested by unions Be supported by unions
Be substantial Be symbolic
Be crisis and incident driven Be planned
Be driven by politicians Be driven by senior executives
Be comprehensive Be partial
Be consistent Be inconsistent
Be top–down Be bottom–up

of success of these reforms were quite similar in Germany compared to

most other countries.
Several of these factors deserve to be singled out. Executives in all ten
countries were asked, in general, not just how successful public sector
reform was, but also whether the reform was too demanding, or not
demanding enough. On these two factors, little cross-country consensus or
clear pattern was observed, as the groups cut across traditional north/south
and east/west divides. Whilst the reform trends in most countries tend to be
assessed as too demanding (especially in France, the Netherlands, Estonia,
Hungary and the UK), executives in Austria, Germany and Norway see
an overall need to speed up reforms. We also see that reforms in Norway,
Estonia, Germany and the Netherlands are considered rather success-
ful, whereas the reforms in Spain, France and Italy are regarded more
critically. This suggests an uncoupling between types of reform undertaken
(which more closely mirrors traditional groupings) and perceptions of
whether these reforms were undertaken in an appropriate manner.
There was significantly more consensus between countries on whether
the reforms were about cutting costs or improving services, but more vari-
ance on whether they had been successful or unsuccessful. Spanish execu-
tives were an extreme case in feeling that the reforms were clearly about
cost-cutting but mostly unsuccessful.
Executives were also questioned about whether the reforms were con-
ducted from the top down or from the bottom up. Here, executives in
none of the surveyed countries felt that the reforms were conducted from
the bottom up, and no clear pattern connected the top–down reforms
with level of success. There were also few cases where executives felt that
the reforms were conducted with significant public involvement, except in
Hungary and Norway. The data gave a slight indication that reforms that
involved the public were seen to be moderately more successful though
(Hammerschmid et al., 2013a).
SUCCESS OF PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS
Overall Impact
Of course, these reforms are aimed at improving the general situation of

public administration in the case countries. After assessing the importance
given to different facets of reform that public administration executives
have experienced over the past five years, and the nature and reason-
ing behind these reforms, we now look at whether these reforms were
perceived to be effective and successful.

The Netherlands
Estonia
Norway
Hungary
Italy
Austria
France
Germany
United Kingdom
Spain
0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0%

Improved Deteriorated
Notes:
Q: Compared with five years ago, how would you say things have developed when it comes
to the way public administration runs in your country?
Figure 16.5 Overall PA assessment
Public executives were asked overall whether they had a positive or

negative opinion of the situation of public administration in their country
compared to five years ago. Here, there is significant variance between
countries in whether their assessment of public administration had
improved or deteriorated (see Figure 16.5). Spain was the only country
where more respondents felt that the situation had deteriorated more than
improved. Views were decidedly mixed in France and the UK, whereas
Norway, Estonia, Hungary and the Netherlands all had high percep-
tions of improvement and low perceptions of deterioration. Concerning
the impact of reforms, the survey aimed for a more nuanced perspec-
tive regarding different performance dimensions such as quality, costs,
transparency or citizen trust in government.
All in all, there is relatively high stability with only moderate changes
in these dimensions over the last five years. Also, there was not signifi-
cant variation from country to country on many of these dimensions (see
Figure 16.6). There was a perception that more managerial factors such as
cost and efficiency, service quality and innovation all improved slightly,
as did external transparency and openness, fair treatment of citizens and
ethical behaviour among public officials. In contrast, there were percep-
tions of a slight deterioration in areas such as social cohesion, staff moti-
vation and attractiveness of the public sector as an employer. Citizen trust

1
Cost and Service External Innovation Fair Ethical Equal Policy
efficiency quality transparency treatment behaviour access to effectiveness
and of among public services
openness citizens officials
7
1
Policy Internal Citizen Staff Attractiveness Social Citizen
coherence bureaucracy participation motivation of the public cohesion trust in
and reduction/ and and attitudes sector as an government
coordination cutting involvement towards employer
red tape work
Notes:
Q: Thinking about your policy area over the last five years, how would you rate the way
public administration has performed on the following dimensions? 1 5 Deteriorated
significantly, 7 5 Improved significantly.
Figure 16.6 Different performance dimensions
in government was seen, on average, to be the aspect that had deteriorated

to the highest degree over the last five years. In certain issues such as inter-
nal bureaucracy reduction/cutting red tape and innovation, there was little
variation between countries in their assessment of these characteristics.
In other areas, most noticeably citizen trust in government, but also in
attractiveness of the public sector as an employer and staff motivation and
attitudes towards work, there was more variation between countries in the
relative success/deterioration in these qualities.

United Kingdom
The Netherlands
Germany
Norway
Austria
Average
Italy
Estonia
Hungary
France
Spain
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Notes:
Q: Thinking about your policy area over the last five years, how would you rate the
way public administration has performed on the dimension ‘cost and efficiency’? 1 5
Deteriorated significantly, 7 5 Improved significantly.
Figure 16.7 Cost and efficiency
Cost and efficiency was the most positively assessed outcome of public
sector reforms overall, with all countries reporting a general improvement
compared to five years ago (see Figure 16.7). The UK and the Netherlands
assessed this most positively, with Germany, Norway and Austria also
having an above-average view of success in this area. In contrast, Spain
was the country that reported least success in this area, although even
there the assessment was generally slightly positive.
At the other end of the spectrum, citizen trust in government was seen as
the least successful outcome of reform trends (see Figure 16.8). This trend
also showed significant variation between countries. Norway was the only
country to feel that citizen trust had modestly improved in the past five
years, with all other countries feeling that it had deteriorated. By some
margin, Spain was the country that felt this aspect had deteriorated the
most, with France, Italy and the UK also having fairly pessimistic views of
citizen trust compared to five years ago.
Each country had slightly different areas in which they felt there was
the most improvement. Situations were generally felt to have improved
in almost all areas in Norway, especially in service quality, cost and effi-
ciency and innovation. Only in internal bureaucracy reduction/cutting of
red tape was there a relatively strong feeling that things had deteriorated,

Norway
Hungary
Austria
Estonia
The Netherlands
Average
Germany
United Kingdom
Italy
France
Spain
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Notes:
Q: Thinking about your policy area over the last five years how would you rate the way
public administration has performed on the dimension: citizen trust in government?; 1 5
Deteriorated significantly, 7 5 Improved significant
Figure 16.8 Citizen trust in government
but even here a larger proportion felt that it had improved. Results were
significantly more positive in all areas apart from innovation when com-
pared to the overall European perception, with service quality, transpar-
ency and citizen trust in government showing the biggest gap between
Norway and the rest of Europe (Lægreid et al., 2013).
In Estonia, fair treatment of citizens, equal access to services and social
cohesion were perceived to have improved more than in other European
countries. Ministerial executives found more improvement in policy effec-
tiveness and policy coherence and coordination, while, at the agency level,
equal access to services and fair treatment of citizens were seen as the areas
in which things were better than five years ago (Savi and Metsma, 2013).
Improvements in the UK were mostly perceived in managerial functions
such as cost efficiency, innovation, service quality and policy effective-
ness, while citizens’ trust in government and attractiveness of the public
sector as an employer were seen by a majority of respondents to have
deteriorated.
Dutch perceptions seem to have been shaped by recent issues in that
country, with citizen trust in government and ethical behaviour among
public officials rated rather low, corresponding to Dutch media stories
about a ‘Dutch dip’ in public trust and numerous ethical scandals that

were revealed within politics and the public service. In managerial areas,
however, the Dutch were mostly positive about the quality compared to
five years ago (Van de Walle et al., 2013). In Germany, managerial aspects
of reform were also most positively assessed, with a majority of respond-
ents seeing improvements in service quality, innovation and cost and
efficiency. In policy-related fields, there was more sense of deterioration,
with overall negative assessments of citizen trust in government, policy
coherence and coordination, social cohesion and policy effectiveness.
In France, most reform outcomes were rated rather negatively, with
cost and efficiency and innovation seen as most improved. In contrast, it
was felt that social cohesion and citizen trust in government had declined
the most, but citizen participation, staff motivation, attractiveness of the
public sector as an employer and cutting of red tape were also seen to
deteriorate. Views on most of these issues were more favourable for execu-
tives from the economic and financial sectors, especially as regards quality
of service. In Hungary, ethical behaviour among officials was seen to be
most improved, but this figure was still significantly below the European
average. In general, Hungarian attitudes towards improvement were
below the European average, with the least improvement seen in areas
such as attractiveness of the public sector as an employer, citizen trust in
government and the cutting of red tape.
Although the Spanish case was the most pessimistic compared to five
years ago, there were certain areas where greater improvement was per-
ceived. Ethical behaviour of civil servants, equal access to services and fair
treatment of citizens were perceived as relatively improved, and service
quality, innovation and transparency and openness also had some positive
perceptions. However, over half felt that citizen trust in government had
deteriorated, and public sector motivation and desirability as an employer
were also perceived negatively. The perception of the public sector as an
employer was actually more positive than the European average.
A few other employment-related factors were also measured in all coun-
tries. Job satisfaction was moderately high in all cases (more positive than
negative), being highest in Norway, the Netherlands, the UK and Italy.
For organizational commitment we found that in all countries executives
showed a rather positive commitment to their organization. Commitment
was especially high in Hungary and Italy, and lowest (but still positive)
in Norway and the Netherlands. On the other hand, work stress showed
fairly significant country variation. Stress was perceived as high in Spain
(more stressful than not), while all other countries found their job to be
less stressful than stressful. Stress levels were particularly low in Austria
and Germany.

IMPACT OF THE FISCAL CRISIS
The financial crisis that has gripped Europe starting in 2008 has had an
impact on the nature of the public sector and its reform in the countries
under study. Only Norway was a significant outlier and barely affected by
the financial crisis. Therefore a majority of respondents in this country did
not perceive any cost-cutting measures. The nature of cuts differs across
countries and can be assessed both in where these cuts took place and the
way in which they were implemented. At an organizational level, most
cutbacks in Estonia were realized through personnel savings. It was felt
that the largest proportion of the cuts were made across all areas, whereas
a somewhat smaller proportion of cutbacks were achieved through tar-
geted cuts. The opposite was true in the Netherlands, where a somewhat
higher proportion felt cuts were targeted, but a significant proportion still
felt that cuts were across the board. Most cuts in that country came about
through hiring freezes and cuts to programmes. In France, a main effect
of the crisis has been an adjustment downwards of public servants’ ben-
efits to come into line with the private sector, along with a hiring freeze.
There was no clear consensus on the nature of these cuts, with almost
equal numbers feeling they were across the board, targeted or achieved
through productivity gains. However, staff cuts and pay cuts are seen as
unimportant in France: although a hiring freeze was in place, this did not
result in cutting of staff. Meanwhile, there was a feeling that the budget
crisis had increased the powers of the Ministry of Finance and centralized
decision-making.
UK reforms in public administration were greatly affected by the down-
turn, which hit the country significantly. The current coalition govern-
ment has made large cuts to the public sector as a response to the crisis.
A majority of respondents felt that these cuts were targeted, but over one
quarter felt that they were across the board and almost 20 per cent felt
they were efficiency savings. In comparison to the rest of Europe, a larger
proportion of UK executives saw some form of cutbacks, and these were
more likely to be a result of pay freezes or staff cuts in the UK. The fiscal
crisis also hit Spain hard, as it moved from above-average growth rates
to significant decline and unemployment. The cuts were perceived by a
large majority to be mostly targeted cuts. Proportional cuts across the
board were the next-largest perceived cut. Many of these savings came
from cutting personnel costs, with hiring freezes, wage freezes and pay
cuts being seen as the most significant, along with cuts to new and existing
programmes. The fiscal crisis hit Italian public administration as well, but
was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Italy had been trying to rein in
public spending before the crisis. The most significant cuts were across the

board, and were significantly higher than the European average, whereas
targeted cuts and efficiency savings were lower than average.
German public administration reform responses to the fiscal crisis
have been evaluated as quite successful. Most executives responded that
they had faced some sort of cutbacks. Compared to other countries,
however, a much higher proportion saw these cuts as targeted, with
fewer seeing across-the-board cuts. As in France, these cutbacks could
not be realized through layoffs or even pay cuts, with savings brought
about more through programme cuts and hiring freezes. Cutbacks in
Hungary were fairly equally seen to be across the board and targeted,
with mainly across-the-board cuts in delivering services, but targeted
cuts at the ministerial level. Although the government in Hungary
explains cutbacks as a move to make the public service more efficient,
interestingly less than 2 per cent of respondents felt that cuts came from
productivity and efficiency savings. Hiring freezes were seen as the
most-used approach to cost-cutting, but staff cutbacks also represented
a higher-than-average level of cost-cutting in Hungary compared to
other European countries.
CONCLUSIONS
While public administration reforms – both NPM and post-NPM types –

have taken place in all the countries under study in Europe, the nature
and extent of these reforms vary greatly. Some of these differences follow
traditional European North/South and East/West divides, but, especially
since the fall of communism and the rapid extension of the EU, this has
become more blurred. Even more interestingly, the perceptions by those
undertaking the reforms of the nature and success of these reforms do not
split along traditional lines.
The countries can be divided along the lines of NPM/post-NPM-style
reforms, as well as the level of success of these reforms (see Table 16.2).
In the Netherlands and Estonia, reforms were mostly seen as positive, and
often followed an NPM-like trajectory. The UK was the only country
that followed an NPM trajectory but had negative views about these
reforms. Other countries focused more heavily on post-NPM reforms, or
had few reforms overall along NPM lines. Some of these still felt that the
reforms were successful, such as Norway, Hungary and to a lesser extent
Germany, while others – most notably France and Spain and to a lesser
extent Austria – had overall negative views of reform that has taken place
(Hammerschmid et al., 2013c).
Some conclusions can be drawn from the above results. First, context

Table 16.2 Views on NPM-style and non-NPM-style reforms
NPM-style reforms Non-NPM-style reforms

Positive view Netherlands Norway
Estonia Hungary
Germany
Negative view UK Spain
Italy
France
Austria
does matter, as there is some differentiation based on the starting points

of each country. However, this is not as strong an indicator of types of
reform as might be expected. Countries with a Napoleonic tradition of
public administration tended to fare poorly in implementing NPM-style
reforms and have a negative view of these reforms, but other groupings
were less clear-cut. While the UK has the longest and strongest history
of NPM-style public administration, it had a negative view of reforms
undertaken, which could possibly be a result of its longer history with
NPM. The two Eastern-bloc cases under consideration – Hungary and
Estonia – have responded differently after their democratic transition and
entry into the EU, with Estonia embracing NPM-style public administra-
tion, whereas Hungarian reform has been more reticent to adopt these
processes. However, both countries saw any reform that took place as
positive. The different clusters presented by this research point to the great
reforms undertaken in the past 20 years (and even in the past five), and
the fact that these reforms, while sometimes having an NPM-style base,
have followed different trajectories that do not always accord with public
administration traditions.
Second, to a great degree reforms depend on public sector autonomy
and politicization. Autonomy was high and politicization low in coun-
tries such as the Netherlands, the UK and Norway, but not in Spain
and Italy. While there was not perfect correlation, in general those with
higher autonomy and less politicization perceived reforms as being more
successful. The level of goal ambiguity had a less clear effect on the rela-
tive success of reforms, as all countries perceived their goals to be more
ambiguous than not, with less cross-country difference.
Third, in almost all countries under study, NPM-type reforms such as
privatization, contracting out or agencification have become less important
in the past five years, often supplanted by post-NPM-style reforms based
on e-government, transparency, citizen engagement and coordination.

Privatization was seen as the least important trend, but some NPM-style
reforms remained important, such as a focus on outcomes and results, and
treating citizens as customers.
There was a significant level of cross-country similarity on the dynam-
ics of implementing these reforms. All countries perceived these reforms
as rather top–down, and all countries apart from Norway felt that these
reforms were undertaken to cut costs rather than to improve services.
Likewise, all countries apart from Norway and Hungary felt that these
reforms were made with little public involvement. There was less cross-
country consensus on factors such as whether these reforms were driven
mainly by politicians or senior executives, or whether these reforms were
contested by unions.
Countries were split on whether reforms – regardless of their type or
dynamic – were successful or not, and there was no clear pattern determin-
ing this perception of improvement or deterioration. There was no signifi-
cant variation on different dimensions of success either, with the average
perception of most executives being clustered around a neutral view,
indicating neither success nor failure. Cost and efficiency, service quality,
transparency and openness, innovation and fair treatment of citizens were
rated relatively positively, but, worryingly, citizen trust in government was
seen to have deteriorated – albeit to a moderate degree – over the past five
years.
Finally, the financial crisis has been seen as an impetus for strengthen-
ing reform in recent years in all countries apart from Norway. It has not
hit the countries to the same extent, and strategies for cost-cutting have
differed across countries, but few felt that it has not affected reform.
Taken together, these factors illustrate the complexity of public service
reform in Europe and the forms it may take. In some aspects, it also shows
a lack of a coherent European-wide pattern of public sector reform and
whether they have been a success. While there is some convergence on
the importance of factors such as e-government and collaboration, in
other areas countries are split on the relevance of reforms, and this is also
reflected in the reforms that have taken place, and their perceived success.
However, there seems to be relatively clear consensus that public adminis-
tration has moved beyond a straightforward NPM-dominated pattern of
reforms (if such a thing ever existed in the first place), with most countries
now embracing post-NPM reforms in response to some of the challenges
and differences the continent has faced.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement
No. 266887 (Project COCOPS), Socio-economic Sciences & Humanities.
NOTES
1. For a more detailed outline of the survey methodology and process, see Hammerschmid
et al. (2013a).
2. See Hammerschmid et al. (2013a) and Hammerschmid et al. (2013c) for a more detailed
description of scales and questions.
REFERENCES
Alonso, J. and Clifton, J. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in Spain: views and experiences from
senior executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Andrews, R., Downe, J. and Guarneros-Meza, V. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in the UK:
views and experiences from senior executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Bezes, P. and Jeannot, G. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in France: views and experiences from
senior executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Bouckaert, G. and Halligan, J. (2008). Managing Performance: International Comparisons.
Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis.
Christensen, T. (2003). ‘Narrative of Norwegian governance: elaborating the strong state’,
Public Administration, 81(1): 163–90.
Christensen, T. and Lægreid, P. (2011). ‘Complexity and hybrid public administration: theo-
retical and empirical challenges’, Public Organization Review, 11(4): 407–23.
Christensen, T., Lie, A. and Lægreid, P. (2007). ‘Still fragmented or reassertion of the centre?’
In T. Christensen and P. Lægreid (eds), Transcending New Public Management. Aldershot:
Ashgate, pp. 17–42.
Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S. and Tinkler, J. (2006). ‘New public management
is dead – long live digital-era governance’. Journal of Public Administration Theory and
Practice, 16(3): 467–94.
Fimreite, A.L. and Lægreid, P. (2009). ‘Reorganization of the welfare state administration:
partnerships, networks and accountability’. Public Management Review, 11(3): 281–97.
Hajnal, G. (2010). ‘Failing policies or failing politicians? Policy failures in Hungary’. World
Political Science Review, 6(1): Article 13.
Hajnal, G. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in Hungary: views and experiences from senior
executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Hammerschmid, G. and Meyer, R.E. (2005). ‘New public management in Austria – local
variations of a global theme?’. Public Administration, 83(3): 709–33.
Hammerschmid, G., Oprisor, A. and Štimac, V. (2013a). ‘COCOPS executive survey on
public sector reform in Europe: research report’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Report.
Hammerschmid, G., Görnitz, A., Oprisor, A. and Štimac, V. (2013b). ‘Public sector reform
in Germany: views and experiences from senior executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3
Country Report.
Hammerschmid, G., Van de Walle, S., Andrews, R., Bezes, P., Görnitz, G., Oprisor, A. and
Štimac, V. (2013c). ‘Public administration reform in Europe – views and experiences from
senior executives in 10 countries’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Cross-National Report.

Jann, W. (2003). ‘Administration and governance in Germany: competing traditions and

dominant narratives’. Public Administration, 81(1): 95–118.
Lægreid, P., Dyrnes Nordø, Å. and Rykkja, L. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in Norway:
Luts, M., Delbeke, K., Hondeghem, A. and Bouckaert, G. (2008). ‘De efficiënte overheid
geanalyseerd: synthese & aanbevelingen’. SBOV II Synthesis Report. Leuven: Bestuurlijke
Organisatie Vlaanderen.
Meyer-Sahling, J.-H. (2011). ‘The durability of EU civil service policy in Central and Eastern
Europe after accession’. Governance, 24(2): 231–60.
O’Leary, R. and Blongren Bingham, L. (eds) (2009). The Collaborative Public Manager: New
Ideas for the Twenty-First Century. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Ongaro, Edoardo (2009). Public Management Reform and Modernization: Trajectories of
Administrative Change in Italy, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Cheltenham, UK and
Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Ongaro, E., Ferré, F., Galli, D. and Longo, F. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in Italy: views
and experiences from senior executives’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Pollitt, C. and Bouckaert, G. (2011). Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis.
Rainy, Hal and Jung, Chun Su (2010). ‘Extending goal ambiguity research in govern-
ment: from organizational goal ambiguity to programme goal ambiguity’. In Richard
M. Walker, George A. Boyne and Gene A. Brewer (eds), Public Management and
Performance. Research Directions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 34–59.
Randma-Liiv, T. (2002). ‘Small states and bureaucracy: challenges for public administra-
tion’. Trames, 6(4): 374–89.
Rouban, L. (2008). ‘Reform without doctrine: public management in France’. International
Journal of Public Sector Management, 21(2): 133–49.
Savi, R. and Metsma, M. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in Estonia: views and experiences
from senior executive’. COCOPS Work Package 3 Country Report.
Torres, L. and Pina, V. (2004). ‘Reshaping public administration: the Spanish experience
compared to the UK’. Public Administration, 82(2): 445–64.
Van de Walle, S., Jilke, S. and van Delft, R. (2013). ‘Public sector reform in the Netherlands:
Van Twist, M., Van der Steen, M., Karré, P.M., Peeters, R. and Van Ostaijen, M. (2009).
Vernieuwende verandering: continuiteit en discontinuiteit van vernieuwing van de rijksdienst.
Den Haag: NSOB.

17. Government challenges in Slovenia at a
time of global economic crisis and
austerity measures
Stanka Setnikar Cankar and Veronika Petkovšek
INTRODUCTION
The global economic crisis has led to a decline in economic activity in

Slovenia and a deterioration in its fiscal position. A system of economic
governance within the context of the so-called ‘European semester’ has
been in place since 2011; it is aimed at strengthening fiscal discipline and
introducing more wide-ranging economic supervision and control. Under
this scheme, Slovenia is obliged to follow the public finance situation more
closely and to take the necessary steps to remedy its position.
Slovenia has made progress towards fiscal consolidation, with the
government adopting an ambitious fiscal consolidation package that
emphasizes the cutting of expenditure. Positive effects are also expected
from the pension reform measures adopted in 2012 and the labour
market reforms carried out in 2013. While Slovenia’s budget deficit is
expected to fall further, public debt will still rise, which is why fiscal
consolidation should continue. Policy decisions in Slovenia have mostly
relied on temporary measures, cuts to the public wage bill and reductions
in discretionary expenditures. More structural reforms and measures are
needed, in addition to the pension and labour market reforms carried out
(OECD, 2013).
In 2013 the European Commission made recommendations for bring-
ing an end to Slovenia’s excessive government deficit. As part of these
recommendations, Slovenia is to abolish the present excessive deficit by
2015, with a deficit target of 4.9 per cent of GDP in 2013, 3.3 per cent of
GDP in 2014 and 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2015. Slovenia is also required
to rigorously implement the measures already adopted to reduce the
public sector wage bill and social transfers, and to increase mainly indi-
rect tax revenue. These measures should be complemented with the new
structural consolidation measures necessary for correcting the excessive
deficit by 2015 (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development,
2013a).
399

IMPACT OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS ON

THE SLOVENIAN ECONOMY, PUBLIC FINANCES
AND ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS
The sharp deterioration in the fiscal position is inhibiting economic recov-

ery. Borrowing costs are increasing, while limited access to the financial
resources of the state is further eroding private sector borrowing condi-
tions; this is affecting competitiveness and reducing the potential for
further economic development. Fiscal policy decisions in the coming years
therefore need to balance two challenges: one is to implement a credible
fiscal consolidation programme; and the other is to pay sufficient regard
to the state of the economy and the adverse effects of fiscal policies on
aggregate demand (OECD, 2012; Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
Economic Activity in Slovenia at a Time of Global Economic Crisis
From the beginning of the economic crisis, the decline in economic activ-
ity in Slovenia was among the highest in the EU. The sharp fall in GDP
in 2009 (–7.8 per cent) was followed by modest growth (1.2 per cent) in
2010 and 2011 (0.6 per cent); however, GDP fell once again in 2012 (–2.3
per cent). Following a significant decline in economic activity in 2009,
the recovery in Slovenia was slower than the EMU and EU average (see
Table 17.1) (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a). Slow economic
recovery in the EMU in general was the result of poor business and con-
sumer confidence, and of uncertainty in the financial markets. Measures
to consolidate public finances are a further reason for the slowdown in
economic activity. These measures will have a short-term negative impact
on economic activity; on the other hand, they are essential if funding is to
be restored to allow economic recovery in the years to come (Government
of the Republic of Slovenia, 2012). In Slovenia in 2012, household
consumption fell by 2.9 per cent and government consumption by 1.6
Table 17.1 Real GDP growth rate, 2008–13 (% of GDP)
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013*

Slovenia 3.4 −7.8 1.2 0.6 −2.5 −2.7
EMU 0.4 −4.4 2.0 1.4 −0.7 −0.4
EU 0.3 −4.3 2.1 1.5 −0.4 0.0
Note: * Forecast.
Source: Eurostat (2013b).

Government challenges in Slovenia 401
per cent. The forecast for 2013 shows a 2.7 per cent decline in GDP in
Slovenia, mainly due to the anticipated deterioration in the situation in
the international environment and a further decline in final consumption.
Poor labour market trends, restrictive payments in the public sector and
the further rationalization of public spending will all lead to a decline in
household and government demand in the next few years (Government of
the Republic of Slovenia, 2013a).
The factors inhibiting recovery come mainly from the domestic environ-
ment, particularly in relation to the situation in construction and related
activities, along with access to sources of financing, fiscal conditions
and trends in the labour market; taken together, these are not creating
conditions for the recovery of private consumption. The tight fiscal situ-
ation, deterioration in the financial environment in which businesses are
operating and deterioration in competition are all factors that will, in the
coming years, have a dominant influence on the subsequent relatively slow
recovery of the Slovenian economy. This shows the necessity of structural
changes and reforms that will increase the potential for growth (Institute
of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, 2012a; Setnikar Cankar
and Petkovšek, 2013a).
Public Finances in Slovenia at a Time of Global Economic Crisis
The public finance situation in Slovenia has worsened since the onset of
the economic crisis. Trends in public finances have been downward since
2008, with the public finance deficit remaining at around 6 per cent of
GDP in recent years and, in 2012, reaching its lowest level (4 per cent of
GDP) since the beginning of the crisis. Government debt has been increas-
ing rapidly since 2008. Without radical short-and long-term structural
measures, Slovenia will be unable to improve its fiscal balance. The need
to balance public finances is justified primarily in terms of providing a
stable and sustainable domestic macroeconomic environment, but also
of meeting EU requirements (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
Development, 2013a; Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
The public finance deficit increased sharply to 6 per cent of GDP in
Slovenia in 2009. There was no significant shift in 2010, but in 2011 the
state of public finances worsened still further, with the deficit reaching 6.4
per cent of GDP. Up to 2010, Slovenia had a lower public finance deficit
compared to the eurozone and EU averages (see Table 17.2). In 2011, with
a deficit of 6.4 per cent of GDP, it recorded a higher deficit compared to
those averages, but in 2012 Slovenia’s deficit fell to 4 per cent, which was
similar to the EU average. Due to past excessive deficits that exceeded the
permitted upper limit of 3 per cent of GDP, the European Commission

Table 17.2 Public finance deficit (PFD) and public debt (PD) in selected
EU countries, 2007–12 (% of GDP)
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

PFD PD PFD PD PFD PD PFD PD PFD PD
Slovenia −1.9 21.9 −6.0 35.0 −5.7 38.6 −6.4 46.9 −4.0 54.1
EMU −2.1 70.1 −6.4 79.9 −6.2 85.6 −4.1 88.0 −3.7 90.6
EU −2.4 62.5 −6.9 74.8 −6.5 80.2 −4.5 83.0 −4.0 85.3
Source: Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (2012a); Eurostat

(2013a).
launched an excessive deficit procedure for Slovenia at the end of 2009

(Government of the Republic of Slovenia, 2012).
On the other hand, Slovenia is still recording a significantly lower public
debt (as a percentage of GDP) compared to the eurozone and EU aver-
ages. Slovenia’s debt reached 46.9 per cent of GDP in 2011 and 54.1 per
cent of GDP in 2012 – still below the upper limit of 60 per cent of GDP
permitted under the Stability and Growth Pact. However, in the 2009–12
period public debt in Slovenia increased relative to the eurozone and
EU-27 averages (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development,
2012a).
Competitiveness of the Slovenian Economy at a Time of Global Economic

Crisis
The macroeconomic imbalance indicators show that economic competi-

tiveness is one of the problems faced by Slovenia. In the years leading up
to the economic and financial crisis, the imbalances were indicated by
strong growth in house prices and private sector borrowing. In addition to
the level of competitiveness in 2009 and 2010, a mild imbalance was seen
in Slovenia’s net financial position and, in 2008 and 2009, in the current
account deficit (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
The IMD Competitiveness Yearbook placed Slovenia 52nd of the 60
countries assessed for overall competitiveness in 2013 (see Table 17.3).
In 2013 Slovenia fell significantly down the competitiveness rankings in
terms of economic performance (from 43rd place in 2012 to 51st place in
2013), with business efficiency also worsening (from 57th place in 2012 to
58th place in 2013). Government efficiency and infrastructure remained in
the same position as the year before. Considerable dissatisfaction with the
current situation and with the opportunities for doing business in Slovenia

Table 17.3 Slovenia’s national competitiveness, 2008–13
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Rank*
Overall performance 32 32 52 51 51 52
Economic performance 25 21 42 43 43 51
Government efficiency 43 38 53 53 53 53
Business efficiency 32 39 57 56 57 58
Infrastructure 29 27 34 31 33 33
Note: * The report included 55 countries in 2008, 57 countries in 2009, 58 countries in

2010, 59 countries in 2011 and 2012, and 60 countries in 2013.
Source: Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek (2013a); Institute for Management Development
(2013).
continues to dominate, as in previous years. Slovenia’s key competitive

advantages are, in particular, the high level of education and a reliable
labour infrastructure; on the other hand, international competitiveness
is inhibited by an inefficient legal system and inefficiency in the work-
ings of government (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a; Institute for
Management Development, 2013).
In the IMD’s assessment, Slovenia’s economic performance deterio-
rated sharply from the onset of the economic crisis, ranking it 51st of the
60 countries in 2013. The deterioration in economic performance was most
strongly detected in the fields of international trade, domestic economy
and employment. According to the survey results, businesses are continu-
ing to think about moving services, R&D and production abroad, which
suggests difficulties with exports and cost-competitiveness. The decline in
these areas is reflected in the deterioration in the business environment. In
the field of business efficiency, Slovenia has declined considerably during
the crisis, being ranked 58th of the 60 countries covered in the 2013 IMD
report. This low ranking is partly the result of low labour productivity,
with one major obstacle to business being the area of corporate finance.
In this area, the main problems are high corporate indebtedness and poor
access for the corporate sector to financial resources, which have fallen
in recent years (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a; Institute for
Management Development, 2013).
The efficiency of the state, which is responsible for ensuring the
proper functioning of the economy, is low compared to other countries
(53rd of 60 countries in 2013). Since the beginning of the crisis, the state
of public finances has deteriorated. The sharpest fall in the country’s

ranking in 2013 was mainly due to a deterioration in the institutional

framework, where the IMD highlights business dissatisfaction with the
inability of government policies to adapt to changes in the economy
and with the poor implementation of government decisions. The area
of business law, particularly as regards the rigidity of labour legislation,
scored poorly. Slovenia’s highest ranking is in the field of infrastructure
(33rd of the 60 countries surveyed in 2013), which in recent years has
also fallen back, mainly due to lack of technological infrastructure and a
legislative and regulatory environment that lacks support and is poor at
promoting R&D, innovation and technological development (Setnikar
Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a; Institute for Management Development,
2013).
Other international competitiveness reports also show how Slovenia’s
competitiveness has declined during the economic crisis. As observed in
the WEF Global Competitiveness Report, Slovenia’s institutional com-
petitiveness has fallen in recent years. The fall in Slovenia’s ranking and
evaluation in the post-crisis period has been noted in most international
comparisons of competitiveness indicators, with most ranking its insti-
tutional competitiveness at a much lower level than in other comparable
European countries; this is largely due to the delay in institutional changes
to adapt to global challenges, a lack of enforcement of the regulations
adopted, and a deterioration in social relations and values. The eco-
nomic survey results show a strong dissatisfaction with the functioning
of institutions, particularly government and the central bank, as well as
with the poor implementation of government decisions and an increase in
bureaucracy and corruption. Eurobarometer also shows that confidence
in government, parliament and political parties has fallen in Slovenia
since the crisis, and is much lower than in other EU countries. Political
uncertainty and low confidence in institutions have had a major effect
on the results of a number of key structural reforms rejected in popular
referendums. People are acknowledging the urgency of measures to con-
solidate public finances; at the same time, they do not believe the govern-
ment is able to take appropriate and fair measures. According to polls, the
need for economic and social reforms that could improve the country’s
competitiveness has gained very low public acceptance, which has also led
to the failure of a number of key structural reforms. A similar picture of
decline in Slovenia’s competitiveness is also reflected in the World Bank
Governance Indicators, as Slovenia’s ranking has fallen in most areas
examined, particularly in relation to corruption. The number of instances
of suspected corruption and other irregularities has greatly increased.
According to the World Bank’s ‘Doing business’ survey, Slovenia’s main
obstacles are the time-consuming procedures for obtaining documents

and licences, as well as the number and length of tax payment procedures
(Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM AND AUSTERITY

MEASURES IN SLOVENIA
Public Sector Reform in Slovenia before the Global Economic Crisis
In Slovenia, public administration represents part of the broader public

sector and consists of state administration, municipalities, and other
holders of public powers and functions. Public administration reform in
Slovenia constituted a systematic set of strategies and activities imple-
mented from the country’s independence in 1991. Public administration
reform in Slovenia can be divided into four steps: 1991–96, when the
country gained independence, established administrative structures and
reformed local government; 1996–99 and 2000–2004, when reforms of
public administration related to EU integration (legislative reform and
other measures towards new public management) took place; 2003–08,
when further modernization through specific policies continued; and
post-2008, when adjustments to cope with the economic crisis were made
(Kovač, 2011).
New public management (NPM) was the key element in the moderniza-
tion of the development of public administration in Slovenia. The aims of
the reform processes were rationalization of structures and resources, user
orientation, the development of e-government and quality management.
Even if certain reforms were driven by the NPM model, NPM in Slovenia
implies merely organization (i.e. not political theory as an ideology of gov-
ernance). All the public administration reforms implemented in Slovenia
can be seen as successful in terms of methodological and technical pro-
gress, for example the rationalization of structures, the optimization of
processes, user-friendly services, e-government and so on. However, the
reforms were less successful with regard to processes disputable in terms
of interests, such as local government and the wages system (Kovač, 2011).
Public Sector Reform in Slovenia at a Time of Global Economic Crisis and

Austerity Measures
In times of economic crisis, public administration takes on a much greater

role; this is because it has to carry out more regulatory tasks, engage in
more direct regulation in decision- making, provide incentives for the
economy and so on (Kovač, 2011). Radical structural interventions

and structural reforms are needed if public finances are to be sustain-

able. These solutions must include rationalization of the public sector,
with structural measures to increase efficiency, and restructuring that
focuses on strengthening the role of development expenditure in order to
promote competitiveness and ensure long-term sustainability. Most meas-
ures to consolidate public finances aim to reduce government expenditure
(streamline the public sector, freeze or reduce employment in the public
sector, reduce public sector pay, reduce social transfers and pension
transfers etc.). At the same time, measures are required on the revenue
side, mainly through the raising of taxes and the introduction of new ones
(Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, 2012a). In the
short term, austerity measures are a necessary step for reducing the deficit
below 3 per cent of GDP. At the same time, these measures do not provide
for a sustainable reduction in the government deficit, as they can, in
certain segments, lead to a deterioration in the quality of public services in
the medium term (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013b).
In November 2008 the Slovenian government formed a group of key
ministers tasked with combating the economic and financial crisis. This
group has created two packages of measures to alleviate the effects of
the financial and economic crisis. In the first set of measures, adopted
in December 2008, the government tried to increase the liquidity of the
banking system, provide additional incentives for economic growth,
reduce public spending resources and preserve jobs. The second package
of measures was drawn up in February 2009 and was slightly more
development- oriented. Additional measures were adopted in the field
of finance and company liquidity, covering the labour market, lifelong
learning and social security, incentives for sustainable development, and
measures to improve the use of cohesion funds (Setnikar Cankar and
Petkovšek, 2013a, 2013b).
In response to a worsening of the situation in Slovenia, the government
began to address the need for structural measures. In October 2009 the
government adopted structural adjustments for 2010 and 2011; and, at the
beginning of 2010, it also adopted the Slovenian Exit Strategy 2010–13.
The main objective of the exit strategy is long-term sustainable economic
growth, to be achieved by economic policy measures, structural measures
and institutional adjustments. The consolidation of public finances by
cutting spending and not raising the tax burden is the guiding principle in
the formulation of economic policy. While ensuring fiscal sustainability,
the social situation of the most vulnerable improves, the competitiveness
of the economy strengthens, jobs and skills are created, and innovation
is promoted. The key task of the strategy is to ensure the consistency of
short-term stimulus measures with long-term structural changes. Major

adjustments to the pension and healthcare systems are among the struc-
tural changes being introduced. Institutional adjustments bring changes
that allow markets and public asset management to function better.
Adjustments are also needed in transport and energy infrastructure to
bring about an effective environmental and climate policy. With measures
to remove administrative barriers and simplify administrative procedures,
Slovenia can improve its economy, which will be reflected positively
in competitiveness and investment (Republic of Slovenia, Government
Office for Development and European Affairs, 2010; Setnikar Cankar and
Petkovšek, 2013a).
In March 2012 Slovenia adopted a package of proposed austerity
measures to balance public finances. These measures related to internal
savings in the public sector, as well as various programmes and policies.
The proposed internal savings measures included organizational meas-
ures to streamline costs, along with other rationalization measures. The
proposed public sector measures included adjustments to the function-
ing of the public sector and to civil servants’ salaries. The proposed
measures relating to programmes and policies covered investment, sub-
sidies and programmes, labour market policy and social security policy.
Through organizational measures, the government sought to optimize
public spending. The measures included the abolition of certain govern-
ment bodies and the transfer and redistribution of tasks to existing gov-
ernment bodies. Through rationalization, the government aimed to merge
and transform a number of public institutions, as well as reduce budget
funding (Government of the Republic of Slovenia, 2012).
Due to the continuing worsening in the economic and financial situ-
ation, and despite the measures taken, in May 2012 the government
adopted the Balancing of Public Finances Act, which aimed to achieve the
following objectives: ensure sustainable public finances; provide a legal
framework for the effective management of public finances; ensure macro-
economic stability; provide for the sustainable and stable development of
the national economy; and establish rules for greater fiscal discipline. The
Act pursued the principles of prudent use of resources and the achieve-
ment of maximum impact in the implementation of specific tasks using
minimum resources. One general solution introduced by the Act was a
reduction in public expenditure, with measures to reduce expenditure in
all areas (Balancing of Public Finances Act, 2012).
Measures and challenges in relation to civil servants

Under the Balancing of Public Finances Act, the government has made
larger cuts to the salaries and other benefits of civil servants. The basic
salaries of civil servants have been progressively reduced by 8 per cent and

protected salaries abolished. Performance-related pay for increased work-

load in 2012 and 2013 was not to exceed 20 per cent of basic salary. The
Act also restricted promotion to a higher pay grade and more senior job
title, determined the payment of the salary bonus for 2012 and a reduction
in the bonus in 2013, and set a reduction in travel expenses, meal expenses,
long-service awards, social assistance, severance pay and mileage and so
on; it also reduced daily subsistence allowances and limited the duration
of service contracts. A maximum number of days of annual leave was also
determined (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
If the 3 per cent deficit limit was to be achieved, an intervention in wages
and other employee benefits in the public sector could not be avoided. Due
to the measures implemented in the second half of 2012, the gross wages
of legal entities in the public sector in 2012 fell by approximately 1.5 per
cent compared to 2011 (Government of the Republic of Slovenia, 2013a).
In addition to measures affecting the salaries of civil servants, the govern-
ment has also had to take measures to change conditions and to reduce
a number of work-related and other benefits in order to bring down the
budget deficit and establish greater sustainability of public finances. This
should also help to achieve the objective of standardizing work-related
and other receipts from employment, which have so far been arranged
differently for different entities (Government of the Republic of Slovenia,
2012). In any case, a reduction in labour costs is a sensible measure in the
consolidation process. The challenge is to create more permanent employ-
ment solutions and a more incentivizing wages policy in the public sector,
which could contribute to greater efficiency (Institute of Macroeconomic
Analysis and Development, 2013a).
Measures and challenges in the field of welfare

The increase in unemployment, a reduction in wages and a lack of liquid-
ity, as well as the current method of adjusting pensions, have given rise to
additional transfers from the state budget to the pension fund. Measures
in the field of welfare are designed to reduce the period of receipt of unem-
ployment benefit for recipients who are over 50 years old and for those
who are over 55 years old and who have an insurance period of 25 years.
The percentage of the baseline from which the benefit amount is deter-
mined is to be reduced to 70 per cent of the baseline in the first two months
and 60 per cent of the baseline in the third month, with the maximum
amount of benefit also being reduced. The Act also abolishes sick leave
for benefit recipients, lowers parental benefits to 90 per cent, and increases
the parental allowance. The general government subsidy for student con-
sumption has been abolished (Balancing of Public Finances Act, 2012;
Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, 2013b).

Some of the measures covering social transfers were temporary, such as

freezing the indexation of social transfers and tying eligibility for annual
allowances for pensioners to the pension amount. The challenge in the
field of social transfers is to provide a more target-based approach and to
improve the transparency and efficiency of the system (Government of the
Republic of Slovenia, 2013a; Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
Development, 2013a).
Pension reform and its challenges

Pension- related measures provide for the harmonization of pensions
and other pension and disability insurance benefits so that, by the end of
2014, pensions and other benefits will no longer be indexed, and pension
supplements will be temporarily reduced (Government of the Republic
of Slovenia, 2013a). In December 2012 Slovenia adopted a new Pension
and Disability Insurance Act aimed at reforming the pension system; this
came into force in January 2013. New pension legislation envisages the
adjustment of the existing pension system to the new demographic and
economic circumstances, ensures its long-term fiscal sustainability and
stability, and provides for decent pensions for current and future genera-
tions of pensioners. Among the other changes, the new pension legislation
brings in a gradual increase in the retirement age to 65 by 2020 (up to now
the retirement age has been 58 for men and 57 for women) (Government
of the Republic of Slovenia, 2013b; Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis
and Development, 2013b).
Pension reform was necessary in order to achieve financial sustain-
ability on the part of the pension fund and to prevent further reductions
in pensions. With these changes, Slovenia has established a fairer, more
reliable and financially more efficient pension system (Government of
the Republic of Slovenia, 2013a). The challenge remains, however, as the
new pension law does not ensure long-term sustainability; this is because
of the rapid increase in the share of the elderly population, which will
increase age-related expenditures (pensions in particular). Recent changes
to the pension system will only have a short-and medium-term positive
impact on fiscal sustainability (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
Labour market reform

Measures relating to the labour market will focus on the development of
the concept of ‘flexicurity’, which will give companies the opportunity
to adapt to market conditions more effectively. Various measures and
incentives are designed to promote the formation and development of
jobs that are adapted to the needs of the elderly, have no adverse health

consequences and contribute to sustainable development. All types of

employment should be promoted, with a particular emphasis on a change
from more flexible employment to permanent employment. Labour
market reforms were adopted in March 2013 with the main objective of
reducing segmentation and increasing labour market flexibility. With a
new labour law, the government wishes to ensure flexicurity by provid-
ing more adequate protection for workers, reducing administrative costs
and levies on businesses, and introducing effective control of violations of
legal requirements. The new solutions will contribute to a higher propor-
tion of permanent employees (Government of the Republic of Slovenia,
2013c). Since the new labour legislation came into force in April 2013, its
impact on segmentation in the labour market, flexibility and labour court
proceedings has been monitored, which will serve as a basis for possible
further amendments. The new Act encourages employment of the elderly.
In this sense the Act retains the long-service bonus as a compulsory con-
stituent of pay. The right is determined by the Act, but the conditions for
its acquisition and the amount are determined by the collective bargaining
agreement for the activity in question. In terms of enhancing flexibility,
the new Act regulates in more detail the possibility of giving workers other
work during their employment; in terms of reducing labour market frag-
mentation, the Act limits the conclusion of fixed-term employment con-
tracts and also introduces measures regarding the payment of employer
contributions (Government of the Republic of Slovenia, 2013a; Institute
of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, 2013b).
Tax-related measures and measures to promote economic activity and

competitiveness
In addition to the cost-saving measures adopted in various fields, there is
also a need for measures designed to increase state revenues. These meas-
ures are connected to raising taxes that have no direct negative impact on
the competitiveness of the Slovenian economy. The Balancing of Public
Finances Act introduces a tax on profits generated by a change in land
use (imposed on the sale of land), an additional tax on boats and an
additional tax on motor vehicles. The Act also introduces an additional
fourth income tax class for 2013 and 2014, and raises the rate of taxa-
tion on all income from capital from 20 per cent to 25 per cent (Setnikar
Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a). In 2013 VAT rates were also raised by two
percentage points to 22 per cent, with the reduced rate being raised one
percentage point to 9.5 per cent (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
To promote economic activity, measures are planned that will eliminate
administrative barriers and payment indiscipline, attract foreign investors,

and provide relief to companies in the form of tax incentives. Tax relief
will be focused chiefly on measures to promote the formation of new busi-
nesses and jobs, investments in funds, and investment in knowledge and
development (Setnikar Cankar and Petkovšek, 2013a).
Future Steps and Challenges Regarding Public Sector Reform and

Austerity Measures in Slovenia
Slovenia needs further structural changes in order to revive the economy.

The changes and reforms should be directed towards: (1) further fiscal
consolidation, where more radical structural interventions on the expendi-
ture side are needed, along with measures on the revenue side; (2) improve-
ments in labour market efficiency, where other flexicurity components
need to be strengthened alongside flexibility (e.g. active employment
policy, lifelong learning), as well as the construction of a system for
monitoring the needs of employers and the needs of labour market; (3)
the creation of a business environment that fosters enterprise (an empha-
sis on reducing the administrative burden and creating an encouraging
tax environment); (4) improvements in the institutional framework that
enable development changes and the implementation of these changes,
and that ensure effective functioning of the legal, economic and political
system; (5) stabilization of the banking system, permanent adjustments to
the pension system, adjustments to the health and long-term care systems,
and an increase in the added value of goods and services (Institute of
Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, 2013b).
Under the National Reform Programme 2013–14, Slovenia is continu-
ing with further measures to limit public sector labour cost volume, as well
as expenditures on pensions and social transfers. Expenditures on invest-
ment will also be limited. The government is also aiming to implement a
policy of reducing the number of employees by 1 per cent per year. The
revenue side also receives some attention alongside the expenditure side,
particularly in terms of measures to improve the efficiency of tax collec-
tion and to reduce the size of the informal economy. Measures for 2013
and 2014 to manage economic imbalances in Slovenia are divided into
three pillars: institutional changes; measures for the short-term revival of
the economy; and measures to improve competitiveness and sustainable
growth in the long term (Government of the Republic of Slovenia, 2013a).
In addition to changes to the economic structure, one very important
obstacle to overcome is the existing institutional framework in Slovenia. It
is essential that the rule of law be improved and the efficiency of regulatory
and supervisory functions be secured; the withdrawal of the government
from the economy is also needed in order to prevent its direct intervention

in the decision-making of economic entities (Institute of Macroeconomic

Analysis and Development, 2013b).
PUBLIC SECTOR CAPACITY AT A TIME OF GLOBAL

ECONOMIC CRISIS
A government plays a series of significant roles – as legislator, owner,
entrepreneur, customer, promoter, facilitator and revenue manager – and
requires an international representative. Public administration therefore
plays an important role in providing frameworks and conditions for the
functioning of the economy. Long-term economic success can be achieved
with high-quality government institutions. At a time of economic crisis
in particular, and in order to aid recovery, government institutions play
a crucial role, as the appropriate institutional environment will lead to a
better business environment, which is vital for the operation of businesses,
for domestic and foreign investments, and for the creation of economic
activity (Petkovšek, 2012; Slabe Erker and Klun, 2012).
A sharp economic downturn can reduce public sector capacity as gov-
ernments make sharp cutbacks to the public sector. If savings were made
entirely by cutting programmes and activities, this would not affect the
capacity of the public sector because it would mean that the government
was asking the public sector to perform fewer tasks. Usually, however,
savings are made in other ways as well, such as cutting capital spend-
ing, trimming non-wage operating budgets to the bone, freezing wages
and so on. Each of these savings limits the capacity of the public sector.
Particularly steep declines in real wages can be very damaging as they lead
to a loss of qualified staff and to breakdowns in organizational discipline
(Polidano, 2000).
Slovenia’s institutional competitiveness has fallen in recent years; in
the post-crisis period, this has largely been due to a delay in implement-
ing the institutional changes required to adapt to global challenges, a
lack of enforcement of adopted regulations, and a deterioration in social
relations and values. For example, the WEF economic survey results
show strong levels of dissatisfaction with the functioning of institutions,
particularly government and the central bank, as well as with the poor
implementation of government decisions and an increase in bureaucracy
and corruption. Political uncertainty and low confidence in institutions
have had a major effect on the results of a number of key structural
reforms, rejected in popular referendums. People are acknowledging the
urgency of measures to consolidate public finances; at the same time,
they do not believe the government is able to take appropriate and

Table 17.4 Number of employees employed by legal entities on the basis

of hours worked
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

(February)
No. of 155 935 157 252 159 297 160 868 159 214 157 534
employees
Source: Buzeti and Stare (2012); Government of the Republic of Slovenia (2013a).
fair measures (Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development,

2012b).
If we consider the role of the public sector and the public finances
that the government has at its disposal in the public sector, one impor-
tant factor is whether the public sector is organized in order to be as
cost-effective as possible and to offer the highest possible quality. In this
respect, the question regarding the most suitable number of public sector
employees is also important (Buzeti and Stare, 2012).
The number of employees in the public sector began to fall following the
implementation of the Balancing of Public Finances Act and its measures
in 2012 (see Table 17.4). Before the Act came into force, the number of
employees had been falling since 2006 only in the administrative sections
of the public sector; in the service sections, by contrast, it had been increas-
ing. The number of public sector employees began to fall in June 2012 with
the implementation of the Act (Government of the Republic of Slovenia,
2013a).
CONCLUSION
The global economic crisis has exposed critical weaknesses in the Slovenian
economy and its development. These include an inflexible labour market,
problems in the financial system, and an insufficiently competitive busi-
ness environment. Immediate radical structural reforms were needed, and
are still needed, if Slovenia is to emerge from the crisis and lay strong foun-
dations for sustainable economic growth, competitiveness and prosperity.
The macroeconomic stabilization of the Slovenian economy is urgently
required. Significant shifts in this direction were made in 2012 in the area
of fiscal consolidation. In addition to the restructuring of the banking
system, fiscal consolidation is the key economic policy challenge that will
improve macroeconomic stability. The consolidation process requires an

economic policy mix that provides a sustainable reduction in the deficit

but also has a less damaging impact on economic growth. Measures to
reduce expenditure must play the central role, while a higher tax burden
in the form of indirect taxes should be only an auxiliary measure for fiscal
consolidation. Discretionary expenditure-related measures are focused on
limiting employee compensation and social transfers; some of these are
temporary. The key challenge of economic policy will be to put in place
permanent measures on the expenditure side that will head off the need to
introduce a crisis tax. A crisis tax would swing the policy mix for deficit
reduction strongly towards the revenue side (Institute of Macroeconomic
Analysis and Development, 2013a; Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis
and Development, 2013b).
Because of the existing structural weaknesses in the Slovenian economy
and the changes in the demographic structure of the population, it is
impossible to achieve fiscal consolidation without larger systemic adjust-
ments in pension, labour market, healthcare and long-term care policies.
The measures adopted to restore public finances are defined as a necessary
first step – one that needs to be followed by measures to create jobs and
employment opportunities for the unemployed and first-time jobseekers.
Governments need to allocate additional resources to the promotion of
self-employment and enterprise by offering assistance in starting a busi-
ness, investing in the necessary infrastructure and financing new projects.
Financing new projects for existing companies through the banking
system must become a common form of business.
REFERENCES
Balancing of Public Finances Act (Zakon za uravnoteženje javnih financ) (2012). Official
Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia, No. 40/2012. Available at http://www.vlada.si/filead-
min/dokumenti/si/projekti/2012/varcevalni_ukrepi/ZUJF_precisceno.pdf.
Buzeti, J. and Stare, J. (2012). Mednarodna primerjava kot vodilo za opredelitev racionalnega
števila zaposlenih v javnem sektorju. In P. Pevcin and S. Setnikar Cankar (eds), Razumen in
razumljen javni sektor v Sloveniji. Ljubljana: Faculty of Administration, pp. 141–56.
Eurostat (2013a). Government deficit/surplus, debt and associated data. Available at http://
appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do.
Eurostat (2013b). Real GDP growth rate. Available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/
tgm/table.do?tab5table&init51&plugin51&language5en&pcode5tec00115.
Government of the Republic of Slovenia (2012). Draft Balancing of Public Finances Act
(Predlog zakona za uravnoteženje javnih financ). Ljubljana: Government of the Republic
of Slovenia.
Government of the Republic of Slovenia (2013a). National Reform Programme 2013–2014.
Ljubljana: Government of the Republic of Slovenia.
Government of the Republic of Slovenia (2013b). New pension legislation (Nova poko-
jninska zakonodaja). Available at http://www.vlada.si/teme_in_projekti/arhiv_projektov/
nova_pokojninska_zakonodaja/.

Government of the Republic of Slovenia (2013c). Changes in labour legislation

(Spremembe delovne zakonodaje). Available at http://www.vlada.si/teme_in_projekti/
arhiv_projektov/spremembe_delovne_zakonodaje/.
Institute for Management Development (2013). World Competitiveness Yearbook 2013.
Lausanne: IMD World Competitiveness Center.
Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (2012a). Economic Issues. Fiscal
Developments and Fiscal Policy (Ekonomski izzivi 2012. Fiskalna gibanja in politika).
Ljubljana: Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development.
Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (2012b). Development Report
2012 (Poročilo o razvoju 2012). Ljubljana: Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
Development.
Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (2013a). Economic Issues 2013.
Fiscal Developments and Fiscal Policy (Ekonomski izzivi 2013. Fiskalna gibanja in politika).
Ljubljana: Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development.
Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (2013b). Development Report
2013 (Poročilo o razvoju 2013). Ljubljana: Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and
Development.
Kovač, P. (2011). The public administration reform agenda in Slovenia – two decades of
challenges and results. Hrvatska I komparativna javna uprava, 11(3), 627–50.
OECD (2012). OECD Economic Outlook: 2012/2. Paris: OECD Publishing. Available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_outlook-v2012-2-en.
OECD (2013). OECD Economic Surveys: Slovenia 2013. Paris: OECD Publishing. Available
at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_surveys-svn-2013-en.
Petkovšek, V. (2012). Primerjalna analiza vpliva javne uprave na konkurenčnost gopodarstev
Slovenije, Avstrije in Italije s poudarkom na čezmejnem sodelovanju. Master’s thesis.
Ljubljana: Faculty of Economics.
Polidano, C. (2000). Measuring public sector capacity. World Development, 28(5), 805–22.
Republic of Slovenia, Government Office for Development and European Affairs
(2010). Slovenian Exit Strategy 2010–2013 (Slovenska izhodna strategija 2010–2013).
Available at http://www.arhiv.svrez.gov.si/si/teme_in_projekti/izhod_iz_krize/slovenska
_izhodna_strategija_20102013/.
Setnikar Cankar, S. and Petkovšek, V. (2013a). Slovenia’s national competitiveness
during the economic crisis and the role of public finance. In Regionalisation and
Inter-regional Cooperation. Belgrade: NISPAcee. Available at http://www.nispa.org/
files/conferences/2013/papers/201305021329520.Paper_Petkovsek,%20Cankar.
pdf?fs_papersPage510.
Setnikar Cankar, S. and Petkovšek, V. (2013b). Austerity measures in the public sector in
Slovenia and other selected European countries. International Conference Europeanization
of Public Administration and Policy: Sharing Values, Norms and Practices, 4–7 April
2013, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Available at http://ipsa2013.iju.hr/downloads/downloads-2/
files/6_2_Setnikar%20Cankar.pdf.
Slabe Erker, R. and Klun, M. (2012). The contribution of institutional quality to lowering
company compliance costs. African Journal of Business Management, 6(8), 3111–19.

18. United Kingdom: government,
governance and public administration
complexity
Duncan McTavish
INTRODUCTION
This chapter outlines the traditional configuration of public administration

in the UK: central government influence, especially in areas of growing
welfare state provision within a unitary state, yet an open economy much
influenced by the international economic and trade environment, subject
to exogenous shock. The ideational and ideological challenges to postwar
Keynesianism saw the UK as a particularly strong candidate for new
public management (NPM) and related approaches to public administra-
tion and government. The chapter analyses the regulatory, inspection,
audit and governance-based dimensions, assessing the impacts and limits
of government and state activity as well as the outcomes in terms of public
and democratic accountability. The final section of the chapter evaluates
the UK’s public administration–territorial complexity in a multilevel
governance environment. Governance of the UK’s relationship with the
European Union (EU) is examined, as are the patterns of asymmetry
within the UK’s present devolution arrangements, concluding with com-
ments on the significance of bi-constitutionalism as an explanatory tool
for UK government and public administration.
THE LONG WALK TO NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

(NPM)
The governmental arrangements and the delivery of public services in the

UK from the late 1940s to the late 1970s is conventionally viewed through
the lens of a ‘traditional’ public administration paradigm. The key aspects
of this included a focus on the management of inputs (resource alloca-
tions), a growing national welfare state, and the prominence of elected
politicians in shaping and defining the scope of government and the public
sector (Stoker 2011). This of course was underpinned by electoral legiti-
macy. General election turnout in 1950 was 83.9 per cent, in 1955, 76.8 per
416

UK: government, governance and PA complexity 417
cent, in 1964, 77 per cent, in 1974, 78.8 per cent, and in 1979, 76 per cent
(Rallings and Thrasher 2007). In the UK, this traditional public adminis-
tration approach had certain particularities not necessarily found in other
democratic polities. There was an especially strong central state direction.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the centrally controlled and funded
National Health Service (NHS), a key instrument of the welfare state.
The central state for much of this period had power over a great deal of
the country’s economic infrastructure through nationalized industries
and utilities. In a more general sense, the state (under both main political
parties, Conservative and Labour) saw itself as a key player in a variety
of economic and business matters, from rationing in the postwar years,
to efforts at indicative planning, and control of prices and incomes in the
1960s and 1970s. Outwith local government, there were no separate elected
administrations in other parts of the UK, and the country was not included
in the six-member European Economic Community (EEC): the dramatic
changes to this landscape, now visible, are addressed in this chapter.
Yet, despite state-centric approaches in the 1950s–1970s, UK govern-
ance was not contained within the governmental boundaries of the UK
state. Suffice it to say that macroeconomic policy from the 1950s focused
on extending sterling convertibility with the underlying assumption of the
UK’s continued role as a leading world player; and this often led to severe
strain on government spending and pay policies (Booth 2000). In no way
could the UK’s economy be considered isolationist. Even after wartime
dislocation, in the early 1950s the UK produced over 30 per cent of the
industrial output of non-communist Europe, half of the world’s trade was
conducted in sterling and it was a major world financial centre (with an
overseas sterling area) (Self 2010). Imports, exports and the international
trading environment were therefore important to the UK.
The UK economy’s high degree of interaction internationally exposed it
to a series of exogenous shocks in the 1970s. There was a sustained slowing
down of economic growth triggered by a fourfold rise in oil prices in the
early 1970s, and a reduction in international trade growth (Kreiger 1986).
The UK’s economy was hit because of its reliance on international trade,
but also due to structural factors: historical reliance on manufacturing
industries; low productivity in these sectors partly due to the rise of new
competitors; and high trade union density (often in multi-union work-
places) leading to the possibility of cost-push inflation. This economic
performance (the UK had an average 2.3 per cent per annum growth in
1960–70 compared to the EEC average of 4.2 per cent – Sanders 1990) and
strained public expenditure (which reached 60 per cent of GDP in the mid-
1970s) at times led to high government borrowing (borrowing increased
by about 40 per cent to £11 billion in one year from 1974 to 1975) and

ultimately, due to failed attempts at incomes policies, to very fractious

industrial relations, particularly in the latter half of the 1970s. The UK
was depicted as the strike-prone sick man of Europe, though in fact by
international standards working days lost through strike action was not a
peculiarly UK phenomenon (Wrigley 1996).
The predominant ideational/ideological framing in this environment
was based on the belief that stagflation (that is, the combination of low
or no growth and high levels of inflation – inflation measured by the
retail price index peaked at 25 per cent in 1974) was endemic to postwar
Keynesian policies and institutional capture in the public sector by vested
interests. There was a belief that politics thus practised posed a threat to
market forces – so, instead of a market failure narrative, there was one
of government failure (Roberts 2010). It was believed that bureaucratic
self-interest not only skewed resource allocation but led to market inter-
ference (Niskanen 1968); and it was argued that the democratic process
itself was prone to inflate public expectations of what governments could
or should deliver. This all provided the underpinning of the ‘government
crisis through overload’ thesis (Crozier et al. 1975; King 1975; Rose 1980).
While an ideologically driven – and medium-to long-term – programme
in response to this could involve state rollback, large-scale privatizations,
the use of market and other non-governmental players in government
and service provision, an immediate and practical political initiative was
to infuse the public sector with efficiency transferred from the business
sector. The UK’s Secretary of State for the Environment in 1980 put it
thus:
Efficient management is the key to the national revival – and the management
ethos must run through our national life – civil service, nationalised industries,
local government, the NHS. (Heseltine 1980, p. 15)
The UK was a particular candidate for such an initiative for two main
reasons. First was the dominance of the central state in the expanding
welfare and social services. Such centralization – which was not universal
throughout Europe, with many countries organizing their welfare systems
differently (Blair 2010) – made central government political and policy
initiative easier. Second, many features of the UK by the late 1970s seemed
to give succour to some of the analysis and ideas provided by public
choice theorists, the overloaded state thesis and pro-market thinking. For
example, there was a powerful bargaining position used by trade unions
in an inflationary environment, which destabilized industrial relations, as
unions ran catch-up exercises that further fuelled inflationary pressures;
attempts to macro-control this via incomes policies were only sporadically
successful. Government borrowing and public finances appeared to be in

crisis at times throughout the 1970s. However, again some perspective is

required: some of the dramatically adverse borrowing figures upon which
the UK’s mid-1970s application for an IMF loan were founded were based
on Treasury miscalculation (‘egregious blunders’, as Reece 2010, puts it);
and by the late 1970s much of the public finance and spend crisis was
under control, with the UK government well committed to a cash limits
regime in public financing, and North Sea oil revenues starting to flow, all
leading to increased confidence from the markets (Ludlam 1992). There
was none the less an undoubted display of policy drift throughout much
of the latter half of the1970s in the UK (Sandbrook 2012). This provided
the backdrop for an environment that would downplay ‘traditional’ direct
state provision of many services, introduce and privilege market-based
and other non-governmental providers and actors in the policy process,
thereby presenting a departure from the post-1945 paradigm.
AN ERA OF NPM, REGULATION AND

GOVERNANCE
NPM, a conceptual understanding about how the public sector is managed,

can therefore be seen as part of a larger picture about the size and role of
the state, the privileging of markets and the positioning of key interests
and agents in the politico-economic environment. There are various defi-
nitions of NPM – some commentators and scholars have noted that the
concept is ill defined – including those that focus on managerial, market
and organizational dimensions; others on entrepreneurial and innovative
government; yet others on consumerism and governmental reform (for a
good account of these, see Van de Walle and Hammerschmid 2011). Most,
however, would acknowledge detail on management, standards and per-
formance measures, output controls, disaggregation and fragmentation,
competition, prioritizing of private-sector-styled management, resource
and cost control, and separation of political decision making from direct
management (Hood 1991).
While discussion of NPM has had considerable prominence in schol-
arly and academic circles, actual hard empirical evidence on the uptake,
impact and effectiveness of NPM is relatively sparse. Studies undertaken
in the UK have shown some increased efficiency in the health sector but
the situation is rather less clear cut in other sectors (Boyne et al. 2003);
some aspects of NPM have been seen to have positive impacts in terms of
performance in English local government (Andrews et al. 2006).
Key to the NPM agenda has been the process of agencification
designed to deal with departmental efficiencies, involving the transfer

of responsibilities from departments to agencies alongside strengthening

agencies’ financial and managerial autonomy. Between 1988 and 2001,
173 agencies were set up, employing staff ranging in number from 30 to
86 000. While some individual agency performance was improved, there
were performance problems where agencies were involved in extensive
joint working with other public bodies (e.g. welfare payments) (James
2003).
Several vital issues should be considered when evaluating NPM. First,
cost, economy and efficiency have been key concerns of NPM; some
indicate these to be essential qualities (Christensen and Lægreid 2007; see
also Hood and Dixon 2013). As such, recent empirical research indicates
that in UK central government in the 1980s and 1990s, cost cutting under
NPM regimes fell far short of what was planned (Hood and Dixon 2013).
Second, agencification has been an important instrument of NPM; in part
this was to bring in managerial practice (and personnel at senior level)
from the private sector. Recent research on UK executive agencies from
1989 to 2012 (which covers the key ‘next steps’ period) has found that, in
terms of the overall stock of chief executives in central government agen-
cies, the majority are from inside the civil service and the vast majority
from the public sector in general (Boyne et al. 2013). This does not tell us
about managerial practices carried out by such individuals within these
agencies, which could of course be much influenced by private sector
practice – this has yet to be researched. Added to this is the fact that there
has been a marked trend towards de-agencification (e.g. the UK Border
Agency, college funding in Wales, aspects of social housing in Scotland).
None the less, a return to the status quo ante is unlikely; we should expect,
rather, a reassertion of some powers to the core government but with
continued delegation elsewhere (Bouckaert et al. 2010). Third, the intro-
duction of private–public funding partnerships, contractual and other
arrangements may in fact contradict value- for-
money and efficiency
goals, apparently central to NPM. There has been a profusion of off-
balance-sheet methods of financing major economic infrastructure, often
involving balance-sheet treatment and retiming of expenditure and finan-
cial engineering. Such policy innovations (e.g. private finance initiative
(PFI)/public–private partnerships (PPP)) are not always assessed on their
contribution to value for money but on scoring against financial report-
ing or national accounts standards. Problems here are compounded by
complex and long-term contractual arrangements that often exceed politi-
cal decision-making time frames (Heald and Georgiou 2011). Finally, the
political–ideational underpinnings of NPM appeared seriously wounded
in the aftermath of the global financial crisis given that (a) the market-
privileging neoliberal policies could be seen to have played a part in the

financial crash and subsequent crisis, and that (b) the short-term response
(especially in the UK and USA) was counter-recessionary and Keynesian
in tone. Yet much of the thinking and policies behind NPM have remained
untouched for a variety of reasons: globalization and international trading
means that competitiveness of the national economy is dominant in
governments’ thinking and that competitiveness means state spending is
constrained – especially given the long-term hangover cost of bank bail-
outs; international regulatory and governance frameworks are important
and individual state action (in the UK or elsewhere) is thereby delimited,
particularly if the ruling paradigm in this environment remains neoliberal
and NPM dominant; and there is limited political pressure to alter this,
given the conflation between the main political parties and state structures
(Hardiman 2012).
Another emphasis can be put on NPM. Whereas the cost, efficiency
and transferability of managerial practices were key concerns in the early
phases of NPM (‘phase one’), through much of the 1980s there was a
somewhat different (though complementary) tone used by John Major
(‘phase two’). This approach recognized the importance of public services
to the population and society as a whole; Major himself attributed his
views in part to his personal background:
When I was young my family had depended on public services – these personal
experiences left me with little tolerance of the lofty views of well-cosseted politi-
cians, the metropolitan media or Whitehall bureaucrats who made little use of
the public services in their own lives and had no concept of their importance
to others. They may have looked down on the public sector and despised it as
second rate but many of them knew nothing of the people who worked there or
the manifold problems they faced. (Major 1999: 246–7)
Performance orientation was to be the focus; more user orientation and

accountability to the citizen–consumer were key to much of Major’s
approach, for example the Citizen’s Charter. Later the focus was on
‘joined-up government’, ‘whole-of-government’ approaches to integrate
some of the fragmentation resulting from earlier reforms and also in rec-
ognition of the fact that complex problems often traversed governmental,
sector and organizational boundaries (Hood 2005; Mulgan 2005). It is
clear that the governance of such arrangements is vital to managing the
delivery of public services rather than traditional mono-bureaucratic pro-
cesses. Considine and Lewis (2003) wrote of this in a comparative study
that examined the UK some ten years ago.
The inspection and regulation of performance and governance in
NPM ‘phase two’ is strongly underpinned by an audit and regulatory
environment. It should be noted, of course, that phases one and two were

not discrete but overlapped: the Audit Commission was created under
Thatcher in 1983 to combine the auditing of health and local government
spending, but it also had a remit to focus on enhancing performance.
However, the regulatory–performance improvement environment has
travelled considerably from the 1980s and 1990s to the present and
has throughout displayed tension. Concern for regulation and inspection
has tended to create a profusion of initiatives and agencies. Interestingly,
two major spikes in this regard occurred under Major (who, as noted, had
some empathy for public services) and Blair, who, as a prime minister of
a left-of-centre party could be expected to have some public service ori-
entation. Under Major, the Citizen’s Charter was launched and this used
comparative performance data ‘to inform the public how their local ser-
vices compared with those of other areas’ (Burton 2013: 234). Major also
invested heavily in separating inspection regimes from service delivery, best
typified by the creation of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).
Under Blair, these initiatives were in the main continued or extended in the
field of health care (Healthcare Commission), social services (Commission
for Social Care Inspection), housing and more, underpinned by National
Service Frameworks and other policy instruments such as Comprehensive
Performance Assessments and Public Service Agreements (Burton 2013).
In some areas there was undoubted regulatory and inspection overload,
with a National Audit Office report in 2009 instancing 35 regulators,
inspection and accrediting agencies with a healthcare remit (National
Audit Office [NAO] 2009a).
Currently what can be observed is something of a tension or ‘divide’ on
the role of regulation and inspection. There is a view that emphasizes the
centrality of direct regulation and inspection, expressed by the NAO:
Regulation – including guidance, inspection and reporting – is central to the

delivery of effective public services and provides accountability for public funds
and essential protection for citizens. Regulation also plays an important role
in delivering improvements to services. For example, inspections and report-
ing can have a critical role to play in highlighting examples of good and bad
performance and variations in public service. (NAO 2010)
On the other hand is the ambition to decentralize power from the centre,
with the state ‘instead of seeking to run services directly . . . [moving
towards] overseeing [author’s emphasis] core standards and entitlements’
(HM Government 2011).
The UK coalition government in 2010 abolished the Audit Commission
and its performance monitoring regime; part of this policy initiative was
to stipulate all items of local government expenditure above £500 to be
published online, with ‘armchair auditors’ filling in part of the void left

by the Audit Commission. This philosophy has been extended to central

government. For example, with regard to the Treasury Business Plan:
By publishing a wide range of indicators, we will enable the public to make up

their own minds about how departments are performing. We will use transpar-
ency to facilitate the choice and democratic accountability which will replace
top down targets and micromanagement. (HM Treasury, cited in Burton 2013:
238)
The managerial and regulatory environment has an impact at individual

organizational level; this is not usually captured when analysing overall
political, policy and governance frameworks. A key accompaniment of
managerialism and regulation has been an ‘audit explosion’, often leading
to ‘rituals of verification’, dysfunctionalities of performance regimes
(including gaming and other strategies), the practice of measuring what
can be measured rather than what public bodies and principals actually
want measured and so on (see Power 1997).
A number of authors have indicated that the expansion of monitor-
ing and auditing has generated ‘spirals of distrust’ within organizations
(Djelic and Sahlin 2012: 750; see also Power 2004; Moran 2002; Hood et
al. 1999). According to this line of thinking, ‘responsibility spirals’ (Djelic
and Sahlin 2012: 751) can occur in organizations where regulatory and
inspection regimes disperse responsibility. Such dispersal is intensified
and accentuated where varying degrees of external (e.g. governmental)
monitoring are devolved or delegated to institutional level – for example
‘earned autonomy’ from more frequent or intrusive audit or inspec-
tion (as in healthcare) or institution-led enhancement or improvement
(as in higher education). It is also accentuated with risk management
regimes (prevalent in public and private sector organizations) seeking to
calibrate and control risk within the organization. Such dispersal, which
usually internalizes much monitoring activity at the local level, leads
to a culture of defensiveness, with people gaming to avoid responsibil-
ity (Power 2004). In complex multi-agency environments dealing with
‘wicked policy problems’ and much dependent on street-level bureau-
crats with considerable discretion, the scope for responsibility avoidance
is immense, especially when the policy area has high political salience.
Sometimes this can have a devastating impact, as several high-profile
child protection cases in the UK and elsewhere have shown (see, e.g.,
Marinetto 2011).

CAPACITY, CONTROL AND COMPETENCE: IS

GOVERNMENT STILL THE KEY PLAYER?
Some interesting analogies and metaphors are used to address this ques-
tion. For example, it has been said that under NPM there is a sense of
standing back from the system, treating it as a black box, choosing output
criteria or providers to effect change. Governance, on the other hand,
involves a stepping into the system, interacting and steering/controlling
to influence matters (Klijn 2012). There has been much debate – which
continues – on the extent to which government’s powers are reduced in
this environment or whether government can actually extend its reach
through processes of metagovernance (Fenwick et al. 2012; Robichau
2011; Bell and Hindmoor 2009; Jessop 2004). However, in this environ-
ment government has to occupy and share a space with other actors
and agents, so metagovernance opens up the arena that distributes and
perhaps relocates governmental power, leading it to interact in a way not
seen as a conventional way of doing government.
The argument is nuanced, with evidence pointing in several directions.
There is evidence that the role of government is somewhat diminished
in the managerial, market-driven and governance environments. A 2008
study calculated that the UK public sector market built around public
services was worth 6 per cent of GDP, second only to the USA and with a
turnover approaching £80 billion (Julius 2008). It is recognized that there
may be a regulatory deficit here. According to the NAO (2012):
When markets are used to deliver public services, the government typically
retains a reversionary interest if services fail, yet it has much less ability to
intervene than when it delivers services directly.
Government has had to use this backstop on a number of occasions,

including in the rail industry and during the 2012 Olympics, when private
contractors failed to provide security and other services (the military had
to step in at large cost). Of particular significance has been government
loss of control of major IT contracts: with much of this outsourced to the
market, departments have been stripped of their supervisory capacity. The
NAO report on major government projects (2009) indicated that only half
of the departments had sound commercial expertise, with special weak-
nesses identified in contract management, commissioning, management
of advisers and business acumen. Much of this was attributed to staff
turnover and loss (NAO 2009b).
There can also be knowledge asymmetries, making it difficult for gov-
ernments to effectively control, supervise or regulate. In areas of banking
and financial services, the expertise required to effectively regulate resides

in the sector rather than in the government, though one must be somewhat
sceptical of this view given the seeming incapacity of leading bankers to
act at crucial stages in the banking crisis, contrasted with the rescue work
carried out by government, especially the UK Treasury (Darling 2011).
Often in major technical and/or environmental disasters (e.g. BP’s Gulf
of Mexico crisis) the technical resources and knowledge to handle and
manage the crisis reside not within government or its regulatory arm, but
with the major companies involved – this was indeed the case with the BP
crisis, even though the US Minerals Management Service was severely
criticized.
Various formulations of the state crisis thesis would lend support to the
idea of government diminution. It has been argued that the overloaded
state of the 1970s (see above) resolved its crisis through economic restruc-
turing and transformation, underwritten by neoliberalism and expanding
markets. In reality, many states and their governments have ‘bought peace’
by relying on cheap money and low interest rates, fuelled by rapid inter-
nationalization of finance and significant build-up of private leveraged
debt based on asset price inflation (Lodge 2013; Streeck 2012). However,
this has been accompanied by the ‘complexification’ of public services and
political decision making (Hood 2011). Citizens find it difficult to articu-
late political blame in the complexity of co-production and co-governance
networks, resulting in a hollowing out of accountability. The UK Audit
of Political Engagement (Hansard Society 2013) shows that, consistently
since 2003, UK citizens have been disappointed by and have become dis-
engaged from formal politics, not actively engaged in its regular processes.
This contrasts with the (admittedly narrower definition of electoral) legiti-
macy in the period 1945–79 highlighted at the beginning of this chapter.
So the message is this: government power is diminished from outwith con-
ventional governmental institutions by market-based and other players in
the governance environment; added to this, government’s legitimacy from
below, from citizens, is diminished too.
But one must view this state depletion thesis, the idea that the UK state
has lost capacity in this governance environment, with some care and
circumspection. The fact that governments move things to independent or
semi-independent bodies who then become part of a governance network,
operating with some autonomy from government, may not necessarily be
evidence that government is losing power or control. Governments may
wish to take actions that are politically contentious and have negative
consequences within the electoral cycle. For example, there can be nega-
tive political consequences for governments directly setting interest rates,
but giving independence to a central bank with authority to do just that,
within broadly defined objectives set by the government, enables a stable

monetary environment over a period not circumscribed by short-term

electoral considerations. This does not represent a downplaying of the
state.
There is a range of evidence to suggest that there is no loss of state
power in key strategic decision making. At the height of the global finan-
cial crisis, the UK Financial Services Authority did not permit Barclay’s
proposed purchase of US-owned Lehman Brothers, fearing the excessive
exposure to risk, much to the dismay of US policy makers. It is undoubt-
edly the case that strong and direct government intervention to shore up
the banking sector, especially in the USA and UK, prevented collapse
of much of the sector in the immediate aftermath of 2008. Strong state
action was also witnessed in muscular counter-recessionary policies and
initiatives that saw, for example, the nationalization of key parts of the
banking sector in the UK and USA, and especially in the latter’s massive
injections of support to key industries (e.g. auto manufacture). There are
also numerous examples of the use of state power in key policy sectors like
education and skills development (Wilson 2012).
Rather than the loss of state power, it is more meaningful to talk of
a depoliticization of state activity. For example, the wide use of regula-
tory impact assessment, particularly in the UK, places considerable
emphasis on ‘objective’ technocratic criteria for the widespread use of a
cost–benefit analysis threshold (rather than, say, political criteria) before
proceeding (Radaelli 2004, 2005). Bodies such as the UK Competition
Commission (UKCC) value political independence and their depoliticized
role; however, governments have no difficulty using state power to over-
ride decisions and recommendations when they consider such veto action
to be in the national interest – as for example when the Brown-led gov-
ernment encouraged the Bank of Scotland–Lloyds TSB merger in 2008
against UKCC advice. However, such depoliticization, if not a sign of loss
of state or governmental power, may come at a democratic cost, implying
a democratic deficit; this will be observed in the following section when
analysing aspects of EU monetary and fiscal stabilization policies.1
In a UK context, other, somewhat different questions can be asked
about the capacity of governments in terms of institutional design and
competence. Governments often fail to achieve policy objectives – or at
least do not optimize policy outcomes – due to a relative lack of resource
or capacity at the centre of government. Prime ministers do not have the
scope of resource of their Cabinet colleagues who head up government
departments; there is no prime-ministerial responsibility for a government
department (except for the relatively small Cabinet Office). Attempts
have been made from time to time to strengthen the centre. Though such
attempts occurred before New Labour, Blair’s governments drove this

with some force, overseeing the appointment of special advisers (‘spads’)

and the creation of centrally controlled units with a remit to drive and
coordinate government policy and action through the whole of govern-
ment (e.g. policy unit – though this pre-existed Blair, it was strengthened
by the following: strategic communications unit; research and information
unit; social exclusion unit; performance and innovation unit; prime min-
ister’s forward strategy unit later combined in the strategy unit; delivery
unit). As recent literature has indicated, this did not prevent serious fail-
ures, including tax credits and plans to issue the public with identity cards,
to name only two (King and Crewe 2013). As King and Crewe point out,
heads of government in almost every European country have much more
significant staff support than the UK prime minister.
In fact there is an issue of institutional design and configuration at
play. In the UK the increased concentration of power at the centre – in
effect in the hands of the prime minister – can be viewed negatively (see,
e.g., Aucoin 2012), running counter to traditional processes and resource
capacities that have seen much policy and service delivery emanating from
departments rather than the centre. But while the case has been made for
the paucity of resourcing and capacity at the centre vis-à-vis international
comparators, criticism can also be made of departmental capacity. There is
considerably shorter tenure and more regular reshuffling of departmental
ministers than occurs in comparable democracies (Huber and Martinez-
Gallardo 2004) and a range of evidence that indicates the adverse impact
of such on government and departmental performance (Riddell et al. 2011;
Public Administration Select Committee 2008). The departmental capabil-
ity reviews were first established in 2005, with subsequent evaluations,
giving an indication of governmental performance. While many of the
reviews and their subsequent follow-up showed substantial improvement
– some sceptics may say inevitably so, since the focus was internal manage-
ment improvement – the NAO in 2009 indicated that the information col-
lected could not prove a link between departments’ actions and improved
performance, that common weaknesses were poor skills, leadership and
understanding delivery models. The NAO’s conclusion was:
it will be possible to determine value for money only when departments dem-
onstrate that specific improved outcomes, including better public services, are
linked to actions taken in response to Capability Reviews. (NAO 2009c)
So UK government seems to have an institutional configuration less

than optimal: a rather weakly resourced centre and a less than efficient
or effective departmental infrastructure. This, despite adverse impact on
governmental competence, does not amount to state depletion.

UK GOVERNANCE AND TERRITORIAL

COMPLEXITY
The UK is firmly embedded within a system of multilevel governance. The

European Union (EU) is the key external dimension to this; but impor-
tant too is the (increasingly) complex governance arrangement within the
UK at the level of devolved polities and local government. It is outwith
the scope of this chapter to address non- governmental organizations
in the governance framework – agencies, collaborative bodies, private
public and third sectors – but these bodies too are significant in the UK’s
governance map. The EU will be considered. Within the UK, the main
devolved polity focus will be Scotland, since this is the most powerful of
the devolved administrations and since its independence referendum in
2014 has high political salience.
The UK government’s relationship with the EU is in some senses puz-
zling. While the dominant coalition partner (Conservatives) is ambivalent
if not hostile, in many areas of macroeconomic policy there is congru-
ence between UK policy and the direction of EU policy. The pro-market,
liberal approaches to address the post-financial crash are founded on
budget deficit reduction, not unlike the aims of the UK coalition govern-
ment. Institutions of the EU, ranging from the European Commission
(EC) to the European Central Bank (ECB), with the support of interna-
tional bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have been
particularly forceful in this regard when providing support to seriously
indebted – at risk of default – nations such as Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus,
Greece; financial support from the European Stability Mechanism is
based on strong public spending cuts and privatization. However, the
trend has been towards a depoliticization and technocratization of eco-
nomic policy management by the ‘Troika’ composed of functionaries from
the EC, ECB and the IMF led by the EC’s Director General for Economic
and Financial Affairs (Olli Rehn). The Troika has a particular locus on
EU support (bailout) packages; however, in parallel, Rehn’s office has
been given responsibility for setting annual targets for all member states,
and these budgets must be submitted to Rehn’s office before going before
parliaments with countries considered ‘at risk’, facing fines of up to 0.2
per cent of GDP; Rehn must also be consulted about other commis-
sioners’ initiatives if they affect government spending (Watkins 2013).
Although much of the Troika’s work pertains to the eurozone, and so
does not directly involve the UK, the nature of the EU within a system of
multilevel governance is considered by some scholars to require an almost
exceptional definition of democracy – to encompass ‘indirect, elitist, depo-
liticised insulated and non-participatory’ conceptualizations (see Flinders

2010: 282) – and this often requires a complex working out of multilevel
governance arrangements between EU and national governments; such is
a key challenge for the practice of public administration.
Nowhere is this more so than in the UK, outside the eurozone and
with a semi-detached commitment to the EU. Supranational oversight
of national banking by the ECB (as proposed by the EC) is relatively
non-controversial throughout Europe, except that the UK government is
opposed to this measure, presumably seeing competitive advantage to the
UK in being outside any European regulatory arrangements. Complexities
are compounded when we observe the shifting dynamic within the EU.
Aspects of the supranational banking oversight are opposed by Germany,
which is resisting an EU-wide deposit insurance scheme and oversight
plans that include the power to take over failed German banks. Beyond
the banking case there appears to be division of thinking over the long-
term governance of the EU that will affect the UK government’s approach
to the EU. There are intergovernmental visions of national governments
coordinating budgetary and macroeconomic policies (led by Van Rompuy,
President of the European Council); but also supranational approaches
for more explicit coordination in the eurozone alone, focusing on the EC
as the key policy institution with different variants of this supranational-
ism favoured by Schauble, Germany’s Finance Minister and Barroso,
when EC President (Watkins 2013). How the UK government responds in
this multilevel governance environment is yet to be seen, though presum-
ably it will engage with the intergovernmental approach more positively.
The political dimension to this may be the most significant on two counts.
First, substantial new powers for supranational or intergovernmental
bodies would require another treaty, entailing referendum processes in a
number of countries, whose outcome at this stage is difficult to predict.
Second, within the UK, a referendum on EU membership (‘in or out’) has
been promised by the Conservative Party by 2017, should it form the next
government. There is added complexity when one considers that a Labour
or Labour-led coalition post-2015 is unlikely to hold a referendum. So it
can be clearly seen that the EU dimension to territorial complexity con-
tains several fault lines with difficult-to-predict outcomes.
The public administration and governance within the UK is well
summed up by the phrase ‘asymmetric devolution’, with the attendant
complexities, continuities and disjunctures that this involves. The back-
ground to devolution has something of a variable geometry. In Scotland,
an unsuccessful referendum for a devolved parliament in the late 1970s
(despite a small majority voting in favour), followed by episodic peaks
of SNP electoral support in the 1980s and 1990s, steady, almost unin-
terrupted, decline of the Conservatives and a stronger commitment to

evolution from Labour/New Labour, along with an articulation of

d
support for self-government from civil society, all led to a clear majority
for devolution in the 1997 referendum. Wales had a wafer-thin majority
for devolution in 1997, but clear support to extend the Welsh Assembly’s
powers in the 2011 referendum. Northern Ireland’s devolved government
is very much a creature of the peace process, based on consociational prin-
ciples (until its suspension in 1972 it was different, more an instrument of
the loyalist majority). Scotland, with around 9 per cent of the UK popu-
lation, has a government with primary legislative powers and an annual
spend in devolved areas of around £30 billion (Scottish Government 2013);
Wales, with under 5 per cent of the UK population, has recently increased
its powers to include primary legislative competence in ‘20 devolved
areas’ with an annual spend just under £15 billion (Welsh Government
2013); Northern Ireland has primary legislative powers in devolved areas,
a population under 3 per cent of the UK’s and an annual spend of £11
billion (Northern Ireland Executive 2013). There is an elected mayor and
separate elected assembly in London (which has over 12 per cent of the
UK population), with powers over policing/fire services and transport.
The combined expenditure of these two areas of responsibility at over
£10 billion approximates the Northern Irish devolved budget (Mayor of
London 2013; Shawcross 2013). There are major paradoxes and anomo-
lies in this asymmetry. For example, while devolution aims to bring some
measure of transparency and accountability closer to the electorate, the
mayor of London has been criticized for opacity in decision making, par-
ticularly over transport (Shawcross 2013). The funding of devolved bodies
(for Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) is historically (rather than needs)
based on the Barnett formula and is not related to fiscal capacity. And,
London notwithstanding, there is no devolved government for England,
which comprises about 83 per cent of the UK population.
Complexities arise due to overlapping responsibilities that may spill over
and cut across various areas of policy. One such example is the Scottish
government’s (then titled Scottish Executive) introduction in 2002 of free
personal care for the elderly. Those receiving this at home were there-
fore no longer eligible for Attendance Allowance (‘reserved’ rather than
devolved, and administered through the UK government’s Department
for Work and Pensions). The subsequent saving to the UK Treasury
was not passed back to the Scottish government, leading it to claim
that this money was lost and so had to be found within existing Scottish
resources. Another example is the issue of Barnett consequentials. Since
the funding for devolved governments is a formula based on UK govern-
ment spend authorized by the UK Parliament, it may mean that funding
for, say, major transport infrastructure will have a consequential effect

on moneys allocated to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – the gov-

ernments there can then spend this in any devolved areas of expenditure.
Arguably this breaks an important principle of democratic governance –
the principle of accountability for money spent and the concomitant
responsibility for raising this money; in fact the entire devolution funding
package could be criticized thus – since there are elected representatives
in the devolved institutions spending moneys they are not accountable
for raising: in effect, representation without taxation. The Scotland Act
2012, implemented from 2015, only partially addresses this – and only for
Scotland – by giving the Scottish Parliament a degree of constrained fiscal
autonomy (though in November 2013, the UK prime minister offered
similar arrangements for Wales after a referendum there).
The final section of the chapter will examine the robustness, resilience,
continuities and disjunctures in the existing pattern of territorial govern-
ance in the UK. Substantial study of the post-1997 period when New
Labour introduced the current Westminster-devolved polity settlement
provides the contextual foregrounding (e.g. Flinders 2010; Bogdanor
2009; Hazell 2008). Despite the devolution policies introduced in the New
Labour years, there was a considerable strengthening of ‘traditional’
Westminster model-type arrangements with strong centralizing around
the executive. Even where there were aspects of a ‘consensus’ rather than a
‘majoritarian–Whitehall’ model developing (to use Lijphart’s terminology
– Lijphart 1999), this was accompanied by strong reserve powers main-
tained at executive level (e.g. with the independent central bank, the
Freedom of Information legislation, incorporation of the European
Convention on Human Rights – see Flinders 2010). It is also the case that
changes to local government governance introduced intensification of the
Westminster system with the widespread adoption (prescribed through
legislation) of Cabinet-style organization in councils, allied of course to
strong central government leverage via funding, much of which came from
the centre and was not raised locally. Post-New Labour, in the current
Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition there is some evidence of a
shift away from strong executive–central focus, with ministers like Gove
(education), Pickles (local government) and Boles (planning minister)
enthusiastic about bypassing established governmental structures (e.g.
local education authorities) and planning regulatory procedures in pursuit
of a localism agenda. It must be stressed, though, that it is far too early to
assess the long-term impact of current coalition government actions.
A key issue to be explored is the impact on UK government and gov-
ernance of the post-1997 devolution settlements, driven particularly by
the experience in Scotland. Based on a more participatory and consen-
sual model of democracy (using, for example, a partially proportional

electoral system with some aspects of institutional design differing from

Westminster), this is said to coexist with the national (UK) system still
largely undisturbed. Such hybridity has been termed ‘bi-constitutionalism’
(Flinders 2010). There are resulting impacts and consequences for the
government of the UK. First, devolution has not been ‘normalized’ as
a framework for UK government (see Parry 2013); this is dramatically
displayed in the absence of any electorally based regional devolution
in England – in fact with New Labour, the instigator of devolution set-
tlement in Scotland, ‘conniving at the heavy loss of the North East [of
England] referendum in 2004’ (Parry 2013: 3). So, while the key purpose of
granting some devolved power to Scotland was to facilitate constitutional
stabilization (see McTavish 2014) giving firmer grounding to Scotland’s
position within the UK – hence the statements from John Smith, Labour
leader before Blair, that devolution ‘was the settled will of the Scottish
people’ and George Robertson, when Secretary of State for Scotland, that
‘devolution would kill Scottish nationalism stone dead’ – the argument is
made that this bi-constitutionalism is always likely to be unstable within
a Westminster-styled unitary state (Flinders 2010). This of course is quite
distinct from further instability with the possible enhanced powers for the
Scottish Parliament in the future and/or knock-on effects in Scottish MPs’
representation and curtailed voting arrangements in the UK Parliament.
There is some evidence of a nascent instability. One may read the lack of
enthusiasm for electorally based devolution in England as a form of satis-
faction or tolerance of existing arrangements, with the devolved govern-
ments’ (in particular Scotland’s) existence and operation accommodated
within prevailing arrangements. However, current evidence based on
public surveys shows a growing feeling of inequity in England regarding
government funding and aspects of political representation (especially vis-
à-vis Scotland). Although the reality (especially regarding public spending
and fiscal transfers) may be more complex, there is none the less a poten-
tial link between perceptions of inequity and a sense of grievance on the
one hand and instability with current constitutional arrangements on the
other.2 The sense of inequity is indicated in Tables 18.1 and 18.2.
Second, there is the possibility that the devolution anomalies or per-
ceived lack of equity might self-correct, but this assumes that, over time,
the constitutional changes made to accommodate devolution in the first
place (i.e. the bi-constitutional arrangements) will transfer back through
attitudinal or cultural change to the heart of the existing Westminster-
centred system itself, thereby countering the destabilizing effects of bi-
constitutionalism (this argument is outlined by Flinders, 2010: 305). There
is scant evidence of constitutional or policy learning in this way post devo-
lution. Studies have shown that, while there are instances of policy trans-

Table 18.1 English attitudes towards Scotland’s share of public spending
Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
% % % % % % % % % %
More than 21 24 24 22 32 41 40 38 44 52
fair
Pretty much 42 44 44 45 38 33 30 29 21 18
fair
Less than 11 9 9 9 6 3 4 4 4 4
fair
Don’t know 25 23 22 25 22 23 25 28 31 35
n 1928 2761 2897 1917 859 982 980 913 1507 3600
Note: Cited in McKay Commission (2013); for 2000–2010 based on British Social
Attitudes Surveys; for 2011–12 based on FoES.
Sources: FoES (2012); Ormston (2012); Wyn Jones et al. (2012).
Table 18.2 Respondents in England agreeing with statements
Scottish MPs no longer vote on English laws 81%

Scottish Parliament to pay for services from own taxes 78%
Scotland gets more than fair share of public spend 52%
Don’t trust UK government to work in England’s interests 62%
n 3600
Note: Cited in McKay Commission (2013).
Source: FoES (2012).
fer and learning from centre (UK, often England) to periphery, there are
precious few examples of periphery-to-centre transfer or learning, and the
same can be said of periphery to periphery (see Nutley et al. 2012); there
are indeed examples of initiatives designed in devolved polities so that
their transfer elsewhere is limited (e.g. Moon’s analysis of ‘made in Wales’
policies under Morgan’s period as first minister – Moon 2013).
Third, the instability thesis can be viewed differently. It can be seen
in terms of how diverse or uniform arrangements are in reality between
devolved polity and UK-centred approaches.
The devolved institutional design is in some senses very different from
Westminster. Scotland’s multi-party system, facilitated by its additional
member proportional-based electoral system, is considered an example
of moderate pluralism (signified by three to five relevant parties not sepa-

rated by intense ideological difference – see Sartori 2005; Bennie and Clark
2003). Only the current Scottish government is an outright single-party
majority; all previous administrations have been coalitions or minority
governments. The period of minority government in particular (2007–11)
in theory empowering Parliament vis- à-
vis the executive conceptually
provides a strong contrast with Westminster. However, the impact of this
must not be exaggerated: although that minority government could not
implement a small number of flagship initiatives due to lack of parlia-
mentary support (e.g. plans for a local income tax and for a referendum
on independence), its legislative output was little different from preceding
majority coalition governments (Lundberg 2013). Other areas of differ-
ence should perhaps be viewed with some caution. While there are areas of
policy divergence (NHS institutional design, higher education fees regime,
organization of elderly care to name a small number), and evidence that,
over time post devolution, there has been greater divergence as policy
capacity and confidence increase (Keating et al. 2012), what should also be
recognized is that policy goals and paradigms may be quite commonplace
across the UK, though the policy instruments and tools used may differ.
For example, the desire to have greater partnership working to provide
more integration and coherence of public service provision is common-
place throughout the UK, though in Scotland there is a greater role for
local authorities in this through the use of ‘single outcome agreements’.
It is well recognized that policy ideas and goals travel more readily than
policy instruments and tools (e.g. Radaelli 2005).
Similarities are not insignificant. There are procedural and institutional
design features that differ from those in Westminster, but the executive’s
power, as in Westminster, is significant; there are examples of a strong
centralization of policy initiatives in some areas (e.g. the creation of
single unified Scottish police, and fire and rescue services, centrally driven
mergers in the college sector, and the ‘voluntary’ freezing of local council
tax since 2008). The adversarial approaches to accountability of govern-
ment in the Scottish Parliament are similar to those in Westminster; the
at-times hostile nature of interaction between government and main
opposition party is equal to that in Westminster (and in the run-up to
the referendum vitriolic). There is evidence to support Mitchell when he
states:
The Scottish Parliament is one of the Westminster family of legislatures . . . the
more proportional electoral system used for Holyrood has given rise to limited
changes in its operation compared to Westminster. The multi party nature of
Scottish parliamentary politics . . . has not altered the fundamentally adver-
sarial nature of Scottish politics . . . nor executive dominance of Parliament.
(Mitchell 2010: 114)

Finally, there is the intriguing irony of a Scottish National Party (SNP)

government acting as an exemplar of traditional Westminster- system
values in the practice of public administration. At the UK level the coali-
tion government’s Civil Service Reform Plan has led to concerns about the
introduction of politicization of the senior civil service (see Pyper 2013);
no doubt the government’s plans are the result of UK ministers’ frustra-
tion regarding the advice and service they are receiving. SNP government
appears to have no such problem, with the civil service giving the impar-
tial advice the government desires; apparently in Scotland ‘politicians
and officials have found a mutual interest in the old model’ (Parry 2013).
Added to this is a robust defence of the traditional ‘British’ delivery model
of public services outlined at the start of this chapter – but outlined here by
Nicola Sturgeon, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Well Being when the
speech was delivered, and from November 2014 Scotland’s First Minister.
There will be no privatisation of the NHS in Scotland . . . unlike its counterpart
in England, NHS in Scotland will remain a public service, paid for by the public
and accountable to the public . . . in the past the Union would have been seen as
not just the creator but also the guarantor of the values and vision of the post
war Welfare State . . . independence will give us the power not only to protect
Scotland from policies that offend our sense of decency and social cohesion.
(Glasgow University Law School, 5 March 2012, cited in Massie 2012)
CONCLUSION
The UK makes an interesting country case in any analysis of public

administration and governance. It adopted a traditional public adminis-
tration paradigm with a strong central state directing and assuming overall
responsibility for the growing provision of public services, accountability
ultimately residing with elected government ministers. There were high
levels of state activity in industrial sectors and utility provision, with day-
to-day operations distanced from politicians but final authority controlled
by government. Alongside was a traditionally strong internationalization
of the UK economy. The result was that shocks from the international
economy, and increased difficulties in making the postwar Keynesian
politico-
economic framework operate with stability, occurred in the
context of a UK state directly placed as the central power source holding
the key fiscal, spending and delivery instruments to effect change.
As has been well documented, the UK’s adoption of this change – NPM
– was more systemic and thorough than in other countries, and the idea-
tional and ideological drive was clear: the accentuation of management,
often transferred in from the business sector; cost control and discipline;

competition; privatization and use of market mechanisms; efficiency

and modernization leading to a separation of policy and management of
delivery through agencies and arm’s-length bodies. The extant research
evaluating the success of these approaches has been sporadic and some-
what sparse: many NPM- type ‘value-for-
money’ initiatives have not
borne fruit; cost control, the key driver in many NPM policies, has had
limited success. But much of the underlying paradigm has remained intact
and shown remarkable resilience since the global financial crash (for an
account of this internationally, see McTavish 2013).
Given the performance improvement and modernization aspects of
NPM, an inspection and regulatory environment developed, leading to a
proliferation of players beyond direct government. Over time the balance
has shifted from direct regulation (which saw two spikes in regulatory
activity under Major and Blair in the 1980s and 1990s) towards an aspi-
ration of ‘overseeing’ core standards and so on. Low-key, ‘light’ or self-
regulation has had mixed success (successful in some areas of professional
or peer-controlled regulation, spectacularly not in parts of the financial
services sector), but in many circumstances very adverse impacts on
organizational culture, creating ‘spirals of distrust’. It remains to be seen if
the aspiration of governments and other regulators to oversee rather than
directly supervise standards will hold – for example, there will be political
demands for greater direct regulation in highly salient areas like health
care.
Viewed in chronological perspective, NPM, public management reforms
and policies influenced by this paradigm have clearly given us a landscape
of governance rather than government. In an era of governance, govern-
ments share the stage with other, non-governmental actors, public and
private. In a complex and interdependent world there are asymmetries of
power. Where governments rely on institutions beyond their immediate
locus, complex co-production and co-governance arrangements may lead
citizens to feel that there is a lack of accountability (with a subsequent
delegitimization of the political system) and an increase in technocrati-
zation and bureaucratization of policy and decision making. But this is
far from saying that government is an off-stage actor with very limited
power or capacity. The chapter shows instances in the UK of government
choosing to distance itself from direct political control; and also cases
where government has taken very direct and effective action when major
national or economic interests are at stake. This is not in contradiction to
(but is compatible with) the notion that competence and capability of gov-
ernment can be lacking at times and could be much improved: the chapter
certainly gave evidence of this.
Finally, of immense significance to the UK government and

overnance is the territorial complexity of the UK government’s field of

g
action and control. For the study and practice of public administration
this raises challenges as significant as those seen in the post-1945 decline
of empire. The chapter examined the UK’s governance relationship
outside the UK, to the EU; and within, the link with devolved polities,
in particular Scotland. The fundamental irony with regard to Europe is
the policy objective congruence between the UK government and the
EU, though running alongside this is an unenthusiastic commitment
to the EU from the main partner in the UK coalition. The param-
eters of complexity of the EU–UK multi-level governance relationship
were examined with reference to the trend towards depoliticization
of economic policy management in the EU, the UK’s hostility to EU
banking supervision (seeing competitive advantage for the UK if outside
these arrangements), division in thinking about future EU governance
between intergovernmental and supranational alternatives and the UK’s
(especially the Conservatives’) particular issues with the EU (‘in’ or
‘out’) referendum.
Devolution within the UK is differentiated, the most powerful polity
being Scotland, but with no devolution in England other than the limited
autonomy of London’s Mayor and Assembly. A key feature of the UK’s
territorial governance system is very limited fiscal autonomy: spending
authority without the responsibility to raise significant levels of revenue,
a democratic-accountability gap. It has been argued that the devolution
settlement has contributed to a bi-constitutionalism, with devolved gov-
ernments departing from the dominant executive-controlled Westminster
model. A range of instabilities and disjunctures that this presents to the
unified UK system of government was examined, balanced by an analy-
sis of similarities and continuities between devolved polity and centre.
The final fundamental irony is that, in contrast to proposals for civil
service reform by the current UK government (and civil service norms,
it should be remembered, are considered a fundamental component of
the Westminster system), the SNP-led Scottish government, whose aim is
an independent Scotland outside the current UK, exhibits a relationship
with the civil service much more aligned to traditional UK Westminster-
styled civil service norms; and the stated position of the SNP government
on public service delivery makes complimentary and positive reference to
traditional UK unionist approaches that, according to the SNP, have been
abandoned by the current UK government.

NOTES
1. An interesting concept is that of negative power, that is the power of prevention, sur-
veillance and evaluation, which it is claimed has substantially increased. The negative
power has ‘the ability to claim the legitimacy to veto political decisions in the name of
supposedly neutral and even natural rules’ (Stein 2006, cited in D’Eramo 2013: 24). The
thesis claims that the prevailing conventional, neoliberal thinking underwritten by an
increasingly powerful range of international financial institutions such as the IMF, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the European Central Bank provides
an institutional conduit for such negative power; and this is politically underpinned by a
narrow political choice (‘essentially the same’) from centre-centre-right to centre-centre-
left. Thus a former governor of the German Bundesbank, Hans Tietmeyer, in 1998
praised national governments for preferring ‘the permanent plebiscite of global markets
to the plebiscite of the ballot box’ (D’Eramo 2013: 25).
2. This of course gives an ironic and historic twist to the quotation from P.G. Wodehouse:
‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of
sunshine’.
REFERENCES
Andrews, R., Boyne, G.A. and Walker, R.M. (2006) Strategy content and organisational
performance: an empirical analysis, Journal of Public Administration Review, 66(1), 52–63.
Aucoin, P. (2012) New political governance in Westminster systems: impartial public admin-
istration and management performance at risk, Governance: An International Journal of
Policy, Administration and Institutions, 25(2), 177–99.
Bell, S. and Hindmoor, A. (2009) The governance of public affairs, Journal of Public Affairs,
9, 149–59.
Bennie, L. and Clark, A. (2003) Towards moderate pluralism: Scotland’s post devolution
party system, 1999–2002, British Elections and Parties Review, 13(1), 134–55.
Blair, A. (2010) The European Union Since 1945, 2nd edn. Harlow: Longman.
Bogdanor, V. (2009) The New British Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
Booth, A. (2000) Inflation, expectations and the political economy of Conservative Britain,
The Historical Journal, 43(3) 827–47.
Bouckaert, G., Peters, B.G. and Verhoest, K. (eds) (2010) The Co-ordination of Public
Sector Organisations: Shifting Patterns of Public Management. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Boyne, G.A., James, O., Moseley, A. and Petrovsky, N. (2013) When do public organisa-
tions recruit outsiders? Paper presented at Public Administration Committee Conference,
Edinburgh, 11 September.
Boyne, G.A., Carrell, C., Law, J., Powell, M. and Walker, R.M. (2003) Evaluating Public
Management Reforms. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Burton, M. (2013) The Politics of Public Sector Reform. From Thatcher to Coalition.
Christensen, T. and Lægreid, P. (eds) (2007) Transcending New Public Management.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Considine, M. and Lewis, J. (2003) Bureaucracy, network or enterprise? Comparing
models of governance in Australia, Britain, the Netherlands and New Zealand, Public
Administration Review, 63, 131–40.
Crozier, M., Huntington, S.P. and Watanuki, J. (1975) The Crisis of Democracy: Report
on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York
University Press.
Darling, A. (2011) Back From the Brink. 1000 Days at Number 11. London: Atlantic.

D’Eramo, M. (2013) Populism and the new oligarchy, New Left Review, 82, July–August,
5–28.
Djelic, M.-L. and Sahlin, K. (2012) Reordering the world: transnational regulatory gov-
ernance and its challenges, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Governance.
Fenwick, J., Miller Johnston, K. and McTavish, D. (2012) Co-governance or meta bureau-
cracy: perspectives of local governance ‘partnerships’ in England and Scotland, Policy and
Politics, 40(3), 405–22.
Flinders, M. (2010) Democratic Drift. Majoritarian Modification and Democratic Anomie in
the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
FoES (2012) Future of England Survey. Edinburgh University and Cardiff University: IPPR.
Hansard Society (2013) Audit of Political Engagement 10: The 2013 Report. London:
Hansard Society.
Hardiman, N. (2012) Governance and state structures, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 228–41.
Hazell, R. (2008) Constitutional Futures Revisited. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Heald, D. and Georgiou, G. (2011) The substance of accounting for public–private partner-
ships, Financial Accountability and Management, 27(2), 217–47.
Heseltine, M. (1980) Ministers and management in Whitehall, Management Services in
Government, 35, 61–8.
HM Government (2011) Open Public Services White Paper. Cabinet Office.
HM Treasury (2010) Business Plan 2011–2015. London: HM Treasury.
Hood, C. (1991) A public management for all seasons?, Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.
Hood, C. (2005) The idea of joined up government. A historical perspective, in V. Bogdanor
(ed.), Joined Up Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–42.
Hood, C. (2011) The Blame Game. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hood, C. and Dixon, R. (2013) A model of cost cutting in government? The great managerial
revolution in UK central government re-considered, Public Administration 91(1), 114–34.
Hood, C., Scott, C., James, O. and Travers, T. (1999) Regulation Inside Government. Oxford:
Huber, J.D. and Martinez-Gallardo, C. (2004) Cabinet instability and accumulation of
experience: the Fourth and Fifth Republics in comparative perspectives, British Journal of
Political Science, 34, 37–41.
James, O. (2003) The Executive Agency Revolution in Whitehall: Public Interest versus Bureau
Shaping Explanations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jessop, B. (2004) Multi level governance and multi level meta governance, in I. Bache and
M. Flinders (eds), Multi Level Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–74.
Julius, D. (2008) Public Services Industry Review. Understanding the Public Services Industry:
How Big, How Good, Where Next? Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory
Reform.
Keating, M., Cairney, P. and Hepburn, E. (2012) Policy convergence, transfer and learning
in the UK under devolution, Regional and Federal Studies, 22(3), 289–307.
King, A.S. (1975) Overload: problems of governing in the 1970s, Political Studies, 23, 284–96.
King, A.S. and Crewe, I. (2013) The Blunders of Our Governments. London: Oneworld.
Klijn, E.H. (2012) Public management and governance: a comparison of two paradigms to
deal with modern complex problems, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Handbook of Governance.
Kreiger, J. (1986) Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Decline. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lijphart, A. (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty Six
Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lodge, M. (2013) Crisis, resources and the state: executive politics in the age of the depleted
state, Political Studies Review, 11(3), 378–90.
Ludlam, S. (1992) The gnomes of Washington: four myths of the 1976 IMF crisis, Political
Studies, 40, 713–27.
Lundberg, T.C. (2013) Politics is still an adversarial business: minority government and

mixed-member proportional representation in Scotland and New Zealand, British Journal

of Politics and International Relations, 15(4), 609–25.
Major, J. (1999) The Autobiography. London: HarperCollins.
Marinetto, M. (2011) A Lipskian analysis of child protection failures from Victoria Climbie
to ‘Baby P’, Public Administration, 89(3), 1164–81.
Massie, A. (2012) Nicola Sturgeon: we must kill Britain to save Britain. Spectator,
6 March.
Mayor of London (2013) MOPAC Budget Submission 2013–2014. Mayor of London, Office
for Policy and Crime.
McKay Commission (2013) Report of the Commission on the Consequences of Devolution for
the House of Commons. www.tmc.independent.gov.uk, accessed 30 October 2013.
McTavish, D. (2013) ‘Who’s responsible for the state we’re in?’ Government and public
sector accountability: accountability and responsibility in an era of crisis and austerity, in
J. Diamond and J. Liddle (eds), Looking for Consensus: Civil Society, Social Movements
and Crises for Public Management. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 3–23.
McTavish, D. (2014) Debate: Scotland, the United Kingdom and complex government,
Public Money and Management, 34(1), pp. 4–8.
Mitchell, J. (2010) The narcissism of small differences: Scotland and Westminster,
Parliamentary Affairs, 63(1), 98–116.
Moon, D.S. (2013) Rhetoric and policy learning: on Rhodri Morgan’s ‘clear red water’ and
‘made in Wales’ health policies, Public Policy and Administration, 28(3), 306–23.
Moran, M. (2002) Understanding the regulatory state, British Journal of Political Science,
32, 391–413.
Mulgan, G. (2005) Joined up government: past present and future, in V. Bogdanor (ed.),
Joined Up Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–95.
NAO (2009a) Reducing Bureaucracy for Public Sector Frontline Staff. London: National
Audit Office.
NAO (2009b) Commercial Skills for Complex Government Projects. London: National
Audit Office.
NAO (2009c) Assessment of the Capability Review Programme. London: National Audit
Office.
NAO (2010) Taking the Measure of Government Performance. London: National Audit
Office.
NAO (2012) Delivering Public Services Through Markets: Principles for Achieving Value for
Money. London: National Audit Office.
Niskanen, W. (1968) The peculiar economics of bureaucracy, American Economic Review,
58(2), 293–305.
Northern Ireland Executive (2013) Budget and Economic Strategy http://www.northernire-
land.gov.uk/index/work-of-the-executive/pfg-budget-economic-strategy.htm, accessed 30
October 2013.
Nutley, S., Downe, J., Martin, S. and Grace, C. (2012) Policy transfer and convergence
within the UK: the case of local government performance improvement regimes, Policy
and Politics, 40(2), 193–209.
Ormston, R. (2012) The English Question: How is England Responding to Devolution?
National Centre for Social Research.
Parry, R. (2013) The odd couple: civil servants and nationalists in devolved govern-
ment, Paper delivered to Public Administration Committee Conference, Edinburgh,
10 September.
Power, M. (1997) The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Power, M. (2004) The Risk Management of Everything. Rethinking the Politics of Uncertainty.
London: Demos.
Public Administration Select Committee (2008) Good Government, HC 2008–09, 97-11,
Ev. 37, 39.
Pyper, R. (2013) The UK coalition and the civil service: a half term report, Public Policy and

Radaelli, C.M. (2004) The diffusion of regulatory impact analysis: best practice or lesson
drawing? European Journal of Political Research, 43(5), 723–47.
Radaelli, C.M. (2005) Diffusion without convergence: how political context shapes the adop-
tion of regulatory impact assessments, Journal of European Public Policy, 12(5), 924–43.
Rallings, C. and Thrasher, M. (2007) British Electoral Facts 1832–2006. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Reece, D. (2010) Economic forecasters are often even less reliable than the weather-
men, Daily Telegraph, 18 May. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7734421/
Economic-forecasters-are-often-even-less-reliable-than-the-weathermen.html, accessed 30
October 2013.
Riddell, P., Gruhn, Z. and Carolan, L. (2011) The Challenge of Being a Minister: Defining
and Developing Ministerial Effectiveness. London: Institute for Government.
Roberts, A. (2010) The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of
Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robichau, R. (2011) The mosaic of governance: creating a picture with definitions, theories
and debates, Policy Studies Journal, 39(1), 113–31.
Rose, R. (1980) Challenge to Governance: Studies in Overloaded Politics. Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage.
Sandbrook, D. (2012) Seasons in the Sun. The Battle for Britain 1974–79. London: Allen
Lane.
Sanders, D. (1990) Losing an Empire, Finding a Role: British Foreign Policy Since 1945.
London: Macmillan.
Sartori, G. (2005) Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Colchester: ECPR
Press.
Scottish Government (2013) Budget Statement www.scotland.gov.uk.publications.2013/
09/9971, accessed 29 October 2013.
Self, R. (2010) British Foreign and Defence Policy Since 1945. Challenges and Dilemmas in a
Changing World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shawcross, V. (2013) Boris Johnson and TfL must commit to greater transparency. Open
Government London 2013.
Stein, B. (2006) In class warfare guess which class is winning? New York Times, 26 November.
Stoker, G. (2011) Was local governance such a good idea? A global comparative perspective,
Public Administration, 89(1), 15–31.
Streeck, W. (2012) Markets and peoples, New Left Review, 73, 63–71.
Van de Walle, S. and Hammerschmid, G. (2011) The impact of the new public management:
challenges for co-ordination and cohesion in European public sectors, Halduskultuur –
Administrative Culture, 12(2), 190–209.
Watkins, S. (2013) Vanity and venality, London Review of Books, 29 August.
Welsh Government (2013) Draft Budget 2013–14, www.wales.gov.uk/ funding/budget/draft
budget1314/, accessed 30 October 2013.
Wilson, G. (2012) Governance after the crisis, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 372–86.
Wrigley, C. (1996) ‘Trade unions strikes and the government’, in R. Coopey and N. Woodward
(eds), Britain in the 1970s. The Troubled Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 261–79.
Wyn Jones, R., Lodge, G., Henderson, A. and Wincott, D. (2012) The Dog That Finally
Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community. London: IPPR.

Conclusion
Karen Johnston
INTRODUCTION
The first decade of the new millennium has revealed unprecedented global
problems in scale and scope. These include the economic and financial
crisis, rapid social and demographic changes, technological advance-
ments, and the global geo-political and governance landscape continu-
ing to exist in a state of change. Nation states that have emerged from
autocratic regimes have embraced the principles of democracy and the
challenge of reforming government during a transitional period in the new
political and socioeconomic ‘order’. Increasingly it may be observed that
countries around the globe are embracing democracy and reforming the
institutions of the state. This is evident in countries in Africa, the Middle
East, South America and Asia, which are removing the vestiges of authori-
tarian rule. Yet a challenge for transitional as well as advanced democratic
polities is to build the institutional, policy and service delivery capacity
of a government in order to deal with rapid and increasingly complex
policy problems. We live in a world that is experiencing rapid change and,
with it, dynamic challenges for governments. As the chapters in this book
have illustrated, there have been ebbs of crisis, followed by change and
the inevitable and seemingly intractable challenges that these present for
government and society in general.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, DEMOCRACY AND

GOOD GOVERNANCE
In the first part of this book Bouckaert provides a discursive interpretation

of governance, with its cornucopia of definitions, but usefully analyses
governance into a typology of a ‘span of governance’. In his review of
governance he argues that democracy and good governance are integral
to the effectiveness of the state. Furthermore, an inclusive state with a
participatory and democratic environment with open and transparent
political systems, facilitating free and open communication, and result-
ing in citizen input in political and administrative decisions, has better
prospects for success in its administrative effectiveness. Thus Bouckaert
442

Conclusion 443
argues that democracy is about participation, transparency, open society,

due process in decision making, responsibility and accountability, legiti-
macy and trusting systems, which are key words that define the concept
of governance.
Bouckaert refers to Fukuyama’s (2013) conceptualization of govern-
ance as ‘government’s ability to make and enforce rules, to deliver ser-
vices’. Fukuyama (1992) argued that the spread of liberal democracies and
capitalism fashioned after Western values signalled the end of a sociocul-
tural evolution, with most countries abandoning authoritarian forms of
government and embracing democracy. He viewed democracy as the final
form of government in humanity’s evolution. This assessment was based
on the collapse of communism. The USSR imploded and countries once
part of the Soviet bloc and supported by the USSR during the Cold War
abandoned communism and moved towards capitalism. This trajectory
was not smooth and had severe implications for the orphans of the Cold
War. In many parts of the world, particularly in Africa, which was emerg-
ing from centuries of colonialism, countries were part of a Cold War game
of chess played by ideological rivalries between the USA and the USSR.
Countries embroiled in this proxy war, such as Afghanistan and Somalia,
remained scarred, recovering from civil wars and lawlessness. Similarly in
Europe, the end of the Cold War ignited a civil war in the Balkans. Even
more recently, in Syria and the Ukraine we see old Cold War ideologies
and allegiances in play. But Fukuyama underestimated the latent and
atavistic conflicts held in check by the Cold War: religion, race, ethnic
jealousies and a welter of vicious regimes funded by crime, especially nar-
cotics and corruption (see Huntington, 2002). There are many promising
developments, however, such as regime changes in Burma and the embry-
onic democratic developments in North Africa. Arguably, we have not
seen the end of history, but rather we are witnessing history in humanity’s
slow march towards democracy and good governance. According to the
International Foundation for Electoral Systems (2013), an international
independent body that monitors elections, there has been an increase in
democratic elections, reaching a peak in 2011.
The increased democratization of states around the globe shows promise,
in terms of expanding the practice of good governance, but equally pre-
sents challenges. The overhaul and reform of political systems and institu-
tions requires, in equal measure, reform of public administration in order
to achieve good governance and provide better socioeconomic outcomes
for society. As interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated,
the failure to build the capacity of public administration had tragic
consequences for the population. Many governments in more advanced
economies have been challenged by the economic crisis and have had

to reduce public expenditure while at the same time maintaining social

welfare service provision as in the case of Greece. The chapter on Slovenia
by Cankar and Petkovšek (Chapter 17) demonstrates this point. The situa-
tion there tested the public administration capacity to balance population
needs in a period of austerity, often requiring innovative policy solutions
and forms of public service delivery.
This book has given a historical account of the socioeconomic, politi-
cal and administrative changes in various countries. Often, in response
to a crisis, governments have made structural and functional changes to
the administrative apparatus of the state. They have struggled and will
continue to struggle to meet dynamic challenges, but the capacity to deal
with complex policy problems appears limited. The book has explored the
capacity of developing and developed countries to address what are often
termed ‘wicked policy problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973; see Chapter 15
by Head and O’Flynn). Wicked policy problems are problematic social
situations where:
1. there is no obvious solution;

2. many individuals and organizations are necessarily involved;
3. there is disagreement among stakeholders about the solutions; and
4. desired behaviour changes are part of the solution. (Rittel and
Webber, 1973).
The problems include, for example, poverty, social exclusion, inequali-

ties, climate change, pollution, terrorism, ethnic rivalry and a range of
intransigent and often perennial issues.
The capacity of governments to address these is integral to good govern-
ance. For example, as evident in the chapters on China, Brazil and India
(Chapters 13, 10 and 12), these countries are experiencing rapid urbani-
zation. Some outcomes of rapid urbanization are slums and endemic
poverty, with poor housing and sanitation, and an increase in diseases
and mortality (particularly child mortality) (Davis, 2007). People who live
in these areas are often not treated as citizens, but are socially excluded;
governments usually respond by demolishing slums and destroying com-
munities (Saunders, 2010). Saunders (2010) argues that the social and
economic vitality of these rising mega-cities is often met with inadequate
and draconian government policies, demonstrating governments’ weak
policy capacity to integrate demographic changes and a growing urban
population, which could contribute to the gross domestic product and eco-
nomic growth of a country. In advanced economies such as the USA there
are also questions about the capacity of governments, at various levels,
to deal with wicked policy problems. Andranovich and Anagnoson, in

Conclusion 445
their chapter on US public administration (Chapter 9), provide numerous

examples, such as Obamacare, various crises such as Hurricane Katrina
and megaprojects disasters, to illustrate the various levels of governments’
ineffectiveness, inefficiency and poor implementation. As Andranovich
and Anagnoson highlight, the root of the public administration chal-
lenge is how the administrative state should be organized to achieve the
collective public good.
The capacity of governments to address wicked policy problems and
societal problems in the new millennium is challenged by the contributing
authors to this book. Indeed, there is a conundrum involved in reforming
the state in order to address complex policy challenges: the exact institu-
tions, the administrative apparatus of the state, that invariably formu-
late reform policies are their implementing agents as well. As Cameron
(Chapter 6) argues, the case of South Africa illustrated the abolition of
apartheid required change and the overhaul of the public administra-
tion, while concurrently implementing public sector reforms and more
progressive development policies. The capacity of the state was tested
by addressing the complex legacy of apartheid policies while simultane-
ously reforming its public administration. In countries such as India, the
trajectory from colonialism to independence saw an overhaul of colonial
administrations, with the challenge of reforming and modernizing public
administration institutions, while addressing complex societal issues such
as religious and caste divides, poverty, inequality and economic develop-
ment. As Tummala (Chapter 12) argues, India is still grappling with mod-
ernizing and reforming institutions of the state, addressing corruption and
professionalizing the civil service.
Most anglophone and Commonwealth countries have adopted the
Westminster form of government, as discussed in this book (see Chapter 4
by Rhodes and Tiernan), with party- political neutrality, impartiality
and objectivity in civil service culture with the aim of serving the elected
government of the day. Yet, as the contributing authors have observed,
the bureaucracy is not value free and in some countries such as India
and Egypt the extreme is evident, with endemic corruption. Moreover,
countries that experience a political transition, particularly those that
move from autocratic forms of government to democratic polities, rely
on a civil service that may be biased towards the values of the previous
political regime. These states are often scarred by conflict and authori-
tarianism, but are dependent precisely on the institutions of the state
to rebuild the country. How do you instil good governance when the
public administration is not accustomed to the principles of democracy,
public service to all, equality, transparency, accountability, openness,
anti-corruption and so on? As Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated,

change in a political regime towards democracy is not sufficient for good

governance. The capacity of government and institutions of the state to
deliver essential services and infrastructure is important to democratic
development, to adherence to progressive constitutional principles, and
to fulfilling people’s aspirations for a peaceful and prosperous existence.
This is often what most citizens live in hope for and justifiably expect from
their government. These traits do not simply materialize. They need insti-
tutional support and protection; training and socialization are required
for officials to broadly serve the public interest according to the principles
of good governance. Andranovich and Anagnoson (Chapter 9) argue for
public administration that has ‘commitment to moral relevance’.
Good governance is more than adoption of democracy by political
actors; it is about state and non-state actors practising a civic duty, a
public service ethos, and serving the citizen (irrespective of race, class,
gender, ethnicity, religion, tribal and caste allegiance) to their utmost for
the common good of society. Public administration is central to good gov-
ernance and the sustainability of democracy. For if citizens feel aggrieved
because of corruption, or if their expectations of the state are not realized,
then democracy stands a very slim chance. People will lose faith in the
institutions of government and their legitimacy. As many contributing
authors to this book have illustrated, trust in and legitimacy of govern-
ment are essential tenets of good governance (see Bouckaert, Chapter 2).
The administrative apparatus of the state plays an important role in gov-
ernance: it is the bureaucracy that provides politicians with advice in the
formulation of policy; and is responsible for policy implementation and
delivery of public services.
Pyper, citing the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for
Asia and the Pacific (2006), argues in Chapter 1 that good governance
involves the principles of accountability, orientation in consensus, effi-
ciency and effectiveness in public services, equitability and inclusiveness,
participation, respect for the rule of law, responsiveness and transpar-
ency. The European Commission’s White Paper on Governance (2001),
as a guiding principle to improve governance within Europe, proposes:
citizen involvement, openness and transparency; better policy, regulation
and delivery; performance improvement of public administration; and
policy coherence. Cameron (Chapter 6), citing the South African National
Planning Commission, lists themes of good governance in public admin-
istration. This list is worth summarizing as it resonates with the themes of
the book: a public service focused on development and serving the public;
free from political interference; instilling the principles of accountability
and transparency; improving human resource capacity; and maintaining a
professional career civil service. There is sufficient empirical evidence for

Conclusion 447
a link between good governance on measures of government and public

administrative effectiveness, low levels of corruption, quality of legal
system and rule of law with measures of economic growth and quality of
life (Rothstein, 2012). Thus good governance and public administration
effectiveness are integral to socioeconomic development, democracy and
political stability.
A recurring theme in the book is the reform of public administration
over the decades and, furthermore, the effects that these reforms have had
on the structure, function and ethos of the administrative apparatus of the
state. We turn our attention in the next section to this central theme, as
well as to further issues that reforms have generated, and the implications
for the capacity of the state to address complex policy problems and effect
good governance.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFORMS
Many countries have, over the decades, embarked on successive waves

of public sector reforms. In Chapter 1 Pyper argues that this was first
in response to the post-World War II demands for development and
modernization, and then in response to the recession of the 1970s. The
latter period saw governments reforming the administrative apparatus
of the state by embracing neoliberal reforms of the public sector. These
public sector reforms were in later years termed new public management
(NPM) (Hood, 1991). They were structural and managerial, and extended
beyond Anglo-Saxon countries. Many countries often borrowed NPM
reforms introduced in the UK under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
There were nuances in the transferability of NPM. The chapter by Curry,
Hammerschmid, Jilke and Van de Walle (Chapter 16) showed that even
in Europe there were convergences and divergences in the application of
reforms (see also Halligan, 2011). There was a general adoption of perfor-
mance management, results-orientated service delivery, contracting out
and privatization. But even in Europe there was variation in the applica-
tion of public sector reforms. In the UK, France, Estonia, the Netherlands
and Slovenia (see Chapter 17 by Cankar and Petkovšek) there was down-
sizing of the public sector, but in Norway to a lesser extent. Transparency
and open government were more prominent in many European countries,
but in France these were less important. In Spain, especially with regard
to agencification and customer orientation, NPM was less evident. Italy,
however, had higher levels of privatization and contracting out than other
European countries. Curry et al. in their chapter found that, in the imple-
mentation of reforms, public sector executives felt that the reforms were

top–down and there were significant variations in the perception of their

success.
In the USA, reinventing government, introduced by the Clinton
administration, also adopted NPM-type reforms with a reduction in
red tape, and a performance, customer and innovation orientation.
Yet, despite the reforms of federal and other levels of government,
Andranovich and Anagnoson argue that American public administra-
tion and its role in governance have resulted in enormous complexity,
large expenditures, outsourcing and private sector contracting, high
levels of distrust, divergent levels of services, a ‘submerged state’ and
high public expectations.
Thus, in general, the neoliberal-type reforms included the privatization
of public sector services and state enterprises, deregulation, contract-
ing out of services to the non-state sector, agencification of government
departments, and the adoption of private sector management techniques
(see McTavish, Chapter 18). Savoie in Chapter 8 provides a good illustra-
tion in a table of the contrasts between public administration and NPM.
The reforms were isomorphically adapted, but Pyper (see Chapter 1),
Halligan (2011 and Chapter 14, this volume) and even Hood (1995) ques-
tion the ubiquity and universality of NPM. As this book has illustrated,
neoliberal public sector reforms did not necessarily travel well. In some
countries the sheer complexity of public administration systems and struc-
tures led to poor implementation of reforms. In other countries the socio-
economic and political context led to unintended outcomes. For example,
in Brazil we see a complex mosaic of patrimony, progressive public admin-
istration, NPM and public governance at various levels of government. In
the USA, as well, the privatization and contracting out of services to the
non-government sector has in fact increased public expenditure and has
also increased the complexity of public service delivery.
NPM as a global paradigm is contested, and it is hoped that this book,
by providing country perspectives, adds to this debate by exploring public
administration systems and reforms in the countries studied. It is not the
intention of this concluding chapter to summarize the arguments of each
chapter of this volume; rather we discuss the consistent themes evident in
the reform of various countries’ public administration. We make some
tentative arguments about public administration and good governance,
and challenges that governments face. We argue that government, in
order to address increasingly complex socioeconomic challenges and
wicked policy problems, should orientate public administration reforms
towards achieving good governance rather than managerial and structural
tinkering. We argue that reforms of the state and its public administration
institutions should include due regard, inter alia, to:

Conclusion 449
● coordinating governance;
● political and administrative relations;
● performance and accountability;
● policy and administrative effectiveness;
● the value of bureaucracy; and
● a public service ethos.
COORDINATING GOVERNANCE:
CENTRALIZATION AND DECENTRALIZATION
As Halligan argues (Chapter 14), there have been two narratives of public
sector reforms in anglophone countries: the neoliberal retraction of the
state in the provision of social welfare services; and the more centralized
control of reforms, with the state playing a steering role. This centraliza-
tion and decentralization of reforms in the public sector is a consistent
theme in the book. The reform of the public sector from a centralization
perspective has seen the rise of top–down reforms with limited input from
street-level bureaucrats (see Chapter 16 by Curry et al.). The outcome is
often poorly implemented reforms, with middle managers and street-level
bureaucrats showing little enthusiasm, understanding and inclusion in the
state’s reform agenda (see Chapter 14 by Halligan). Rhodes and Tiernan
(Chapter 4) refer to this as a central capability vis-à-vis an implementa-
tion puzzle where central government capacity is focused on tools used by
political leaders to coordinate and regulate the government environment,
which is increasingly becoming pluralized, fragmented and contested.
This puzzle is perhaps magnified in countries where there is limited
capacity of the central state apparatus to include and build a consensus
on public sector reforms through various stakeholders. Thus a conse-
quence of more centrist public sector reforms is the rise of performance
management systems, metrics and a bureaucracy to collect and analyse
the performance data. As many of the contributing authors to this volume
have argued, performance management has had unintended outcomes,
such as game-playing, bureaucratic rivalry and fragmentation, demotiva-
tion and even corruption. In countries such as South Africa, where there
is poor capacity to capture the public sector performance data make the
implementation of reforms a moot exercise. Yet in other countries perfor-
mance management has enhanced the delivery of services, accountability
and transparency (see, for example, Chapter 16 by Curry et al.). This
reminds us of the importance of deploying a skilled workforce to gather
and analyse data.
The decentralization theme of public sector reform may have e mpowered

local and regional public agencies as well as non-state actors, but here too
are challenges of fragmentation, coordination, duplication, ‘postcode
lottery’ and variant public service provision. Thus we argue, as does
Halligan, and Rhodes and Tiernan, that the challenge for any govern-
ment is the capacity for vertical and horizontal coordination. There are
two dimensions of governance in the capacity of governments for vertical
and horizontal coordination of policy and public services. The vertical
dimension is what Hooghe and Marks (2003) termed the Type I form
of governance. Type I governance is the distribution of authority across
jurisdictions with a limited number of territorial levels (ibid.). The vertical
coordination across jurisdictions and multi-levels of governance is evident
in the EU, and in states with federal political architecture such as the USA,
Canada and Brazil. Even in the UK, a seemingly unitary state, McTavish
(Chapter 18) argues that the UK polity struggles with the implementa-
tion of policy across an increasingly divergent decentralized system of
governance.
The horizontal dimension of coordination refers to what Hooghe and
Marks (2003) termed the Type II form of governance. There is no defined
jurisdiction, with a fluidity of state and non-state actors operating across
boundaries in policy specific areas (ibid.). According to Rhodes (1996,
2000), governance involves interactions between various network actors.
He argues that
these networks are characterised, first, by interdependence between organisa-

tions. Governance is broader than government, covering non-state actors . . .
Second, there are continuing interactions between network members, caused
by the need to exchange resources and negotiate a shared purpose. Third, these
interactions are game-like, rooted in trust and regulated by rules of the game
. . . Finally, the networks have significant degree of autonomy from the state.
Networks are not accountable to the state; they are self-organising. (Rhodes,
2000: 61)
Thus, as Curry et al. observed in Chapter 16, NPM-type reforms such as

privatization and contracting out appear to have been superseded by a
new agenda of partnerships and network governance. We therefore see an
increasingly complex environment of service provision by state and non-
state actors in various horizontal network arrangements. Andranovich
and Anagnoson also make the observation that there is increased com-
plexity, with multiple scales (from supranational to local levels) involving
the public sector, contractors, private and non- governmental institu-
tions working through markets and networks to deliver public services.
The accountability of non-state actors such as the private sector in the
provision of services poses challenges in horizontal coordination.

Conclusion 451
Thus, joining up and coordinating government and agencies across the

vertical and horizontal dimensions of governance requires the reconcilia-
tion of Rhodes and Tiernan’s puzzle, that is, formal and informal coor-
dination. They argue in Chapter 4 that governments confront two broad
tasks in such multi- organizational systems: managing individual net-
works; and managing a portfolio of networks. This, they argue, requires
collaborative leadership, which in turn requires government leaders to be
integrative, facilitative, hands-off and diplomatic rather than directive,
hands-on, and command and control in style. However, as various con-
tributing authors to this volume have observed, the top–down and direc-
tive style of leadership is more evident. This control-and-command style of
leadership, and indeed public sector reforms, are principally the function
of a political environment with a demand for results-based service delivery
and accountability. In the coordination of governance across increasingly
complex vertical and horizontal dimensions, governments face a paradox
of coordination. As discussed in this volume, governments face demands
by citizenry and subnational levels of government for the decentralization
of policy and public service delivery to satisfy the needs and democratic
demands of the local population, or in some cases to shape bureaux at
subnational levels of government. Yet there is a need for policy and public
service provision to be coordinated from a central level, to ensure equality
in the provision of services and accountability of public administration
performance to the electorate.
Accountability for performance of government is integral to good gov-
ernance and democratic ideals. Thus coordinating governance in terms of
reconciling the centralization and decentralization of policy and public
services requires capacity-building and training to effect collaboration
among government departments at and across various levels, as well as
with non-state actors involved in service delivery. The term ‘joined-up
government’ has become a cliché, but was a response to increased frag-
mentation as a result of neoliberal reforms. The poor operationalization
of collaboration is partly due to a reluctance to share financial and human
resources between government departments and the streamlining of pro-
cedures, lines of accountability and managerial systems. Neoliberal mana-
gerial performance and accountability processes entrenched bureaucratic
organizational silos rather than encouraged coordinated and collaborative
governance.

POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE INTERFACE:

ACCOUNTABILITIES AND PERFORMANCE
The capacity for collaborative leadership within network governance

is mediated by a political environment with an electorate that requires
accountability, transparency and responsiveness (principles of good gov-
ernance). In most Western democracies, citizens ultimately hold politi-
cians accountable for public policy and public services, irrespective of the
delivery agent. The political context of public administration is a recurring
theme of many chapters.
Neoliberal reforms and network governance, as many authors in this
volume have argued, far from enhancing accountability, had unintended
outcomes. Many contributing authors have observed the fragmentation
of accountability. Marketization and networks resulted in the authority
of public service delivery being dispersed across vertical and horizontal
dimensions of governance. Rhodes and Tiernan in Chapter 4 observed the
anomaly of a ‘web of accountabilities’. Accountability is often tested in a
time of crisis. Questions emerge over which government agency, network
or contracted organization is responsible and who should be held account-
able when public service delivery goes awry. The recent banking crisis pro-
vided an insight into the complex web of regulation (or perhaps the lack
thereof), the public and private sector interface, and national and interna-
tional networks. Even in geographically localized crises such as flooding in
the UK or Huricanne Katrina in the USA, disputes among various levels
and agencies of government were played out in the media, with a frus-
trated citizenry demanding responsiveness and accountability. At a global
level, accountability for more complex crises and problems such as the
banking crisis becomes an enigma. ‘Who should be held accountable for
what’ becomes opaque in modern society, with an increasingly complex
web of policy formulation and implementation. This is perhaps an accusa-
tion from which the EU, as a multi-level system of governance, suffers.
An erosion of accountability and transparency alienates the citizenry and
makes the disaffected public question governance and the legitimacy of
state institutions (Rothstein, 2012).
Savoie, in Chapter 8, argues that the NPM reforms of the Canadian
public service saw the politicians attacking the bureaucracy for inef-
ficiencies and red tape, and for introducing results-based accountability
and private sector principles. Politicians wanted the public service to
reflect a bottom line of performance and be held accountable, but the
capacity of government departments to measure is inadequate. This is
true for the South African case as well, where public sector reforms were
implemented in an erratic and inconsistent manner, with high levels of

Conclusion 453
political interference. In South Africa, NPM did not actually improve

performance, nor did it address complex socioeconomic problems and the
legacy of apartheid. The success of NPM reforms in South Africa is there-
fore questionable. In the USA, Andranovich and Anagnoson (Chapter 9)
argue that many of the public administration reforms were politically
motivated and, moreover, ‘the reasons why the public sector is not func-
tioning well in the USA are not fundamentally administrative – they are
political’.
The link between measuring public service performance and accounta-
bility is desirable, but often problematic for a number of reasons. First, the
public service, given the political context and, as Savoie argues in Chapter
8, has its own intrinsic characteristics and cannot be measured according
to the bottom line of a profitability benchmark. The public service for
the most part delivers services that are often intangible and socially ben-
eficial in nature, making measurement difficult. For example, measuring
the progression rates of students passing a level of examination does not
measure their educational gains; and the number of patients on a hospital
waiting list may provide some evidence of the efficiency of the hospital,
but does not measure long-term health benefits and outcomes. Robert
McNamara (2003), whose career started in the Ford Motor Company as a
statistician, and who later became the US Secretary for Defense, reflecting
on the Vietnam War, stated that the ‘body count’ provided data on the
number of enemy combatants killed, but it did not imply that the outcome
was a US victory in South-East Asia. As Savoie notes, ‘Efforts to borrow
management practices from the private sector overlook the reality that
public and private sectors are fundamentally different in both important
and unimportant ways.’
Second, performance management may not necessarily enhance
accountability and the principles of good governance. To the contrary, as
many contributing authors to this volume observed, there has been game-
playing and corruption. The chapter on South Africa is illustrative of this
point. Third, the political–administrative relationship becomes fraught
with blame-shifting between politicians and bureaucrats. McTavish in
Chapter 18 cites Djelic and Sahlin (2012), who describe regulatory, per-
formance and inspection regimes dispersing responsibility and creating
‘spirals of distrust’. The result is often accountability falling between the
cracks, and the neutrality of the administrative apparatus of the state being
tested by political interference. In Chapter 8, Savoie describes the case of
the Chief Statistician for Canada, Munir Sheikh, who resigned after minis-
terial interference cast doubt on his integrity and that of Statistics Canada.
Politicians ultimately wish to provide the electorate with evidence
of the delivery of electoral promises, and do so vicariously through

the administrative apparatus in order to be re-elected. This pressure is

manifested in the political–administrative interface. Public administra-
tors play an important role here. They not only provide policy advice
on the formulation involved in the implementation and on occasion the
evaluation of policy, but importantly the administrative arm of govern-
ment plays a mediating role in political excesses (see Page and Jenkins,
2005; Peters, 2001). As the case of India illustrates, the convergence of
roles between politicians and administrators leads to corruption. The
separation of powers and roles between politicians and administrators is
important to the preservation of democracy. The hybridization of politi-
cal and administrative roles (see Aberbach et al., 1981) is not desirable.
The party-political neutrality and impartiality of public administration is
fundamental to good governance.
Finally, holding politicians and administrators accountable for gov-
ernment performance is essential to good governance, but it should be a
means to an end and not an end in itself. The performance measurement of
government activity is complex, given the qualitative factors and outcomes
of the public policy environment. According to Dunleavy and Carrera
(2013), measuring the productivity of government is difficult, although
not insurmountable, given the dynamic political environment, with conse-
quent policy shifts, policy demands and variations, a lack of domestic and
international comparative benchmarking data, poor data collection and
standardization, changing data specifications, and resistance to measure-
ment from political and public officials. Measuring the performance of
a government department is a managerial tool and should be considered
alongside other measures to enhance accountability. It can have positive
and negative outcomes, as discussed earlier; performance and account-
ability systems can erode collaborative efforts. Chapter 17 by Cankar
and Petkovšek, for example, demonstrates performance management as
applied in Slovenia, which had the positive result of improving fiscal pru-
dence, but had negative effects of eroding staff morale. Performance man-
agement and targetization can never address complex socioeconomic and
wicked policy problems. This requires joined-up, collaborative, innovative
thinking of policy solutions to increasingly challenging socioeconomic
problems rather than bureaucratic organizational rivalries and target-
chasing bureaucrats appeasing the whims of political masters.
IN PRAISE OF BUREAUCRACY
Du Gay’s (2000) book entitled In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber,

Organisation, Ethics, makes the case for the contribution of bureaucracy

Conclusion 455
against an onslaught of neoliberal reforms and political managerialism.

Bureaucracy has often been associated with inefficiency, ineffective-
ness, red tape, over-regulation, risk-aversion and so on. Administrators
are often caught in a puzzle of embracing private sector principles of
risk-taking, providing choice, responsiveness and efficiency gains versus
compliance with the rule of law, service provision on an equitable basis,
responsiveness to a broader populace with varying needs (as opposed to a
narrowly defined clientele), and making efficiency gains within the context
of decreasing public finances (particularly in this period of financial
crisis and austerity measures) and increasing public demands for services
(given demographic changes and political electoral promises). Many of
the authors in this volume have made the case for the pervasiveness and
persistence of bureaucracy. Bouckaert, Perri 6, Drechsler and Savoie, for
example, in their contributions to this volume, remind us of the Weberian
ideals of bureaucracy. The rule, merit-based and communitarian organi-
zation provides a positive contribution to government. Indeed, Pyper
notes that good governance prescriptions by organizations such as the
World Bank, the EU and the United Nations stress the importance of
Weberian-orientated government with, inter alia, ‘precise and unambigu-
ous rules; merit-based recruitment; . . . public officials less susceptible to
bribery; and a transparent system of responsibility’ (see Pyper, Chapter
1 in this volume, citing Pierre and Rothstein, 2011: 409). Weber viewed
bureaucracy as a rational and efficient form of organization mediating
arbritarianism and corruption, with a fixed jurisdictional area of authority
ordered by laws, hierarchically ordered officialdom and based on merito-
rious careers and promotion (see Mommsen, 1974; Du Gay, 2000; Meier
and Hill, 2005). This, Weber believed, was imperative for the stability of
democratic political systems (Mommsen, 1974; Du Gay, 2000).
Some of the authors of this book have argued that the values of bureau-
cracy have been eroded by neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Indeed,
it appears that some public sector reforms such as agencification have
reduced the policy and administrative capacity of government; marketiza-
tion and contracting out have fragmented service delivery with resultant
accountability and transparency complexities; fixed contracts and declin-
ing salaries have reduced staff morale and made the public sector seem a
less attractive career. Governance and networks as described above have
had their own unintended, negative outcomes. Perri 6, however, questions
the theory of governance and raises the debate about hierarchy and net-
works. He argues in Chapter 3 that the theory of governance is a myth and
suffers from ‘stretch’. Moreover, he argues that hierarchy is an underlying
institutional ordering that encompasses hierarchical bureaucracy, which
remains a pervasive form of institution. Perri 6’s view is that the centrality

of government and bureaucracy remains, with the ‘hollowing out’ of the

authority of the state overstated. The state remains prominent through
regulation and policy instruments in managing networks. Fenwick et
al. (2012) also argue that the authority of the state is not being eroded
through governance networks, but rather extended through bureaucracy
involving non-state actors and organizations in a meta-bureaucracy.
The policy and administrative capacity of government to deal with
complex, wicked policy problems depends on the extent to which govern-
ments engage directly in institutional design and support successful imple-
mentation (see Halligan, Chapter 14). Yet many government reforms are
focused at best on internal capacity to improve managerialism, and the
external focus tends to be on reducing dependence on internal capacity
by relying on external expertise through third parties or non-state actors
and relinquishing responsibilities to ‘spirals’ and ‘webs’ (see chapters
by Halligan; McTavish; Rhodes and Tiernan). Perri 6 (see also Chapter
4 by Rhodes and Tiernan) argues that public administration requires
institutional analysis to understand the positive and negative dynamics
of institutional change. Thus, if neoliberalism has eroded the values of
bureaucracy and has unintended outcomes such as fragmented account-
abilities and corruption in some countries, has eroded the policy capac-
ity of public administration, has created anomalies or puzzles, and has
provided inadequate instruments to effectively and innovatively deal
with increasingly complex, global wicked policy problems, what could
this volume contribute to debate on postmodern public administration
and governance? We believe that public administration should establish
a public service ethos to achieve public administration effectiveness and
good governance.
PUBLIC SERVICE ETHOS
Neoliberal public sector reforms have swung the pendulum towards the
intrinsic values of private sector consumerism and competition, with, as
discussed above, unintended outcomes. Barberis (2011) argues that NPM
and private sector values have undermined the principles of a public
service ethos. Indeed, public administration and bureaucracy became
synonymous with an anachronistic, monolithic form of organization:
rule-bound, inefficient, rigid and so on (see Peters and Pierre, 2003).
Proponents of NPM who hailed the death of bureaucracy and hollow-
ing out of the state may have been premature in their analysis. As many
authors in this volume have stated, government and its administrative/
bureaucratic apparatus is still prominent and central to any political

Conclusion 457
system. In any democratic system, politicians operate within a turnstile of

electoral cycles, but the permanency and political neutrality of the public
administration is a value to society, and therein lies its power. As with any
arm of government, this power, in terms of a good governance narrative,
should be monitored and held accountable. Politicians, through various
policy instruments and reforms, have sought to do this with varying
success, as illustrated in the chapters of this book. Irrespective of various
attempts at institutional changes across the decades, as described by the
contributing authors of this volume, and although various public admin-
istration scholars over the decades have debated, coined and contested
the terms and theories of NPM, governance and new public governance,
fundamental to values of public administration must be a public service
ethos.
Simply, a public service ethos is the principle of serving all of the public
as opposed to personal, political, tribal or other self-interests and preju-
dices. A public service ethos includes the ethical conduct that Kernaghan
(1993: 6) describes as ‘principles and standards of right conduct . . . not
only with distinguishing right from wrong and good from bad but also
with the commitment to do what is right or what is good’ for the public.
O’Toole (1993) describes public service ethos as the setting aside of
personal interests; working altruistically, anonymously and collegially for
the collective public good of others; and conducting oneself with integrity
and professionalism to deal with diverse problems that need solving if the
public good is to be promoted.
As Drechsler argues in Chapter 5, contrary to neoliberal reforms, public
administration should instil a public service ethos that incorporates high
standards of ethical and meritorious conduct. Drechsler (citing Jones,
1998) argues that public administrators should adopt Confucianism,
which promotes harmony over individual freedoms, consensus over
choice, and communitarianism over individualism. Indeed, Drechsler
questions the orthodoxy of neoliberal Western-style public sector reforms,
and points out, as do other contributing authors to this volume, that these
reforms have reduced the noble profession of achieving common goals of
the collective public good for all. He goes on to make the case for explor-
ing non-Western paradigms of public administration and governance.
For example, the Five Pillars of Islam speaks of communitarianism, self-
sacrifice, and public service and charity to others. The Chinese historically
viewed public service as prestigious, and Savoie in Chapter 8 calls for a
return to viewing public service as a noble profession incorporating an
esprit de corps. Andranovich and Anagnoson in Chapter 9 cite Dvorin
and Simmons (1972), who believe that the struggle to achieve better gov-
ernance cannot be found in the routine application of existing models

of public administration, but that bureaucracy should be grounded in

concerns for human dignity with morally relevant public administration.
Many scholars, commissions and supranational organizations have
listed principles of ethical standards, features of a public service ethos and
good governance for those in public office (see O’Toole, 1993; Pratchett
and Wingfield, 1994; Nolan, 1995; Barberis, 2001; IMF, 2007). Thus a core
set of values of public service should include, inter alia: accountability and
transparency; honesty and impartiality, selflessness; serving the public;
altruistic motivation; loyalty to the community, organization, profession
and the public; rejecting corruption and the appropriation of public office
for personal gain; and respect for the rule of law. As Bouckaert argues,
these are key tenets of democracy and good governance.
In an age of modernity and postmodern public administration we
believe these normative values hold true, but are worth restating and,
indeed, as Du Gay (2001) argues, public administration and Weberian
bureaucratic values need to be reasserted. He states:
in the field of public administration this can be undertaken by describing practi-

cal ways in which actual existing bureaucratic practices function as institutional
manifestations of a conscious effort to create responsible, accountable govern-
ment by ensuring discretion is not abused, that due process is the norm and not
the exception, and undue risks are not taken that undermine the integrity of the
political and administrative system. (Du Gay, 2001: 4)
A footnote to this discussion of a public service ethos is that the integrity

and functioning of political and public administration institutions will
increasingly be questioned. Governments will face escalating public scru-
tiny in an age of modernity and technological advancement to capture
and disseminate knowledge of public service functionality and delivery.
Particularly in an era of social media, there are increasing networks of
scrutiny and calls for open government. Andranovich and Anagnoson
in Chapter 9 on the USA illustrate the pervasive nature of technology in
public administration. Blame-shifting, game-playing, poor public value
and service provision, and fragmented diffusion through webs of account-
abilities or spirals of responsibilities will not be tolerated by an ever-
demanding and expectant public.
The electoral promises by the political class and introduction of
neoliberal-type reforms in the public sector with promises of choice,
responsiveness, consumerist values and private sector standards have
opened a Pandora’s box of expectations. The public will no longer,
through the lens of an information age and increased awareness, tolerate
mediocrity. As Ahmed Badran in Chapter 7, describing the Arab Spring,
demonstrates, frustration with corruption and poor public service d elivery

Conclusion 459
can destabilize a political system. Increasingly, whether in countries in

Africa, Asia, Europe, North or South America, societies are holding
government to account through social media and becoming active co-
governors in the delivery of services. Thus, as does Barberis (2001), we
add to the list of principles of a public service ethos: ethical conduct in
the provision of quality public services for the common, public good to
achieve good governance.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, we argue that, for public administration to adhere to the

principles of good governance requires:
● an inclusive, democratic political and administrative environment;

● a public service ethos;
● resource investment to improve policy making and administrative
capacity rather than institutional managerial reforms or tinkering;
● preserving party-political neutrality of administrative institutions
without political interference;
● continuous improvement towards prudent and effective delivery of
quality public services;
● collaborative and coordinated accountability and governance; and
● innovative policy capacity to address wicked policy problems.
Neoliberal public sector reforms will, at best, if implemented correctly,

create organizational efficiencies and, at worst, create anomalies, but will
not necessarily provide the administrative capacity to address wicked
policy problems and achieve good governance. Moreover, to improve
the administrative and policy capacity of civil servants to formulate and
implement innovative policies requires educational programmes and
knowledge exchange in public policy and public administration. Good
governance and a public service ethos should be at the core of the cur-
riculum and knowledge exchange, and should include a collaborative
effort among practitioners and scholars to learn the lessons and formulate
innovative policy solutions. Governments’ capacity to deal with complex
problems requires not merely management training, often reinforcing
neoliberal-type reforms, but instillation of a public service ethos. Public
administration according to Confucian doctrine should be viewed as a
noble profession consisting of an esprit de corps, serving the public and
solving wicked policy problems for the common and collective good
with due regard to human dignity. It is hoped that this volume has made

some contribution to this exchange of knowledge of the various coun-

tries’ public administration and governance reforms, lessons, challenges
and how they are addressing crisis and wicked policy issues. Developing
the policy capacity of civil servants will be key to addressing the global
challenges that we face in this new era.
REFERENCES
Aberbach, J.D., Putnam, R.D. and Rockman, B.A. (1981) Bureaucrats and Politicians in
Western Democracies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barberis, P. (2001) ‘Civil society, virtue, trust: implications for the public service ethos in the
age of modernity’, Public Policy and Administration, 16(3), 111–26.
Barberis, P. (2011) ‘The Weberian legacy’, in Andrew Massey (ed.), International Handbook
on Civil Service Systems, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar
Publishing, pp. 13–30.
Davis, M. (2007) Planet of Slums, London: Verso.
Djelic, M.-L. and Sahlin, K. (2012) ‘Reordering the world: transnational regulatory gov-
ernance and its challenges’, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Governance.
Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber. Organisation. Ethics, London: Sage
Publications.
Du Gay, P. (2001) The Politics of Bureaucracy, Abingdon: Routledge.
Dunleavy, P. and Carrera, L.N. (2013) Growing the Productivity of Government Services,
Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Dvorin, E.P. and R.H. Simmons (1972), From Amoral to Humane Bureaucracy, San
Francisco, CA: Canfield Press (Harper & Row).
European Commission (2001) White Paper on Governance, COM(2001) 428, Brussels: EC.
Fenwick, J., Miller Johnston, K. and McTavish, D. (2012) ‘Co- governance or meta-
bureaucracy? Perspectives of local governance “partnerships” in England and Scotland’,
Policy & Politics, 40(3), 405–22.
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin Group.
Fukuyama, Francis (2013) ‘What is governance?’, Governance, 26(3), 347–68.
Halligan, John (2011) ‘NPM in Anglo-Saxon countries’, in T. Christensen and P. Lægreid
(eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public Management, Farnham: Ashgate.
Hood, C. (1991) ‘A public management for all seasons’, Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.
Hood, C. (1995) ‘Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm?’, Public Policy
and Administration, 10(2), 104–17.
Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2003) ‘Unravelling the central state, but how? Types of multi-
level governance’, American Political Science Review, 97(2), 233–43.
Huntington, S.P. (2002) The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the New World Order,
London: Free Press.
IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2007) Manual on Fiscal Transparency, http://www.imf.
org/external/np/pp/2007/eng/051507m.pdf, accessed January 2014.
International Foundation for Electoral Systems (2013) http://www.ifes.org/, accessed
November 2013.
Jones, D. (ed.) (2008), Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, Chicago
and La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Kernaghan, K. (1993) ‘Promoting public service ethics: the codification option’, in R.A.
Chapman (ed.), Ethics in Public Service, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 15–30.
McNamara, R. (2003) The Fog of War, E. Morris (director), Sony Pictures.
Meier, K.J. and Hill, G.C. (2005) ‘Bureaucracy in the twenty-first century’, in E. Ferlie,

Conclusion 461
L.E. Lynn Jr and C. Pollitt (eds), Public Management, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 51–71.
Mommsen, W.J. (1974) The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of
Max Weber, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Nolan (1995) First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life – Vol. 1: Report, Cm
2850 – I, London: HMSO.
O’Toole, B.J. (1993) ‘The loss of purity: the corruption of public service in Britain’, Public
Policy and Administration, 8(2), 1–6.
Page, E.C. and Jenkins, B. (2005) Policy Bureaucracy. Government With a Cast of Thousands,
Peters, B.G. (2001) The Politics of Bureaucracy, Abingdon: Routledge.
Peters, B.G. and Pierre, J. (eds) (2003) Handbook of Public Administration, London: Sage.
Pierre, J. and Rothstein, B. (2011) ‘Reinventing Weber: the role of institutions in creating
social trust’, in T. Christensen and P. Lægreid (eds), The Ashgate Companion to New Public
Management, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 405–16.
Pratchett, L. and Wingﬁeld, M. (1994) The Public Service Ethos in Local Government: A
Research Report, London: Commission for Local Democracy.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (1996), ‘The new governance: governing without government’, Political
Studies, 44(4), 652–67.
Rhodes, R.A.W. (2000) ‘Governance in public administration’, in J. Pierre (ed.), Debating
Governance: Authority, Steering and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 54–90.
Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973) ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, Policy
Sciences, 4, 155–69.
Rothstein, B. (2012) ‘Good governance’, in D. Levi-Faur (ed.), Governance, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Saunders, D. (2010) Arrival City, London: Random House.
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2006) What is
Good Governance?, www.unescap.org/huset/gg/governance.htm, accessed January 2014.

Index
Abbott, Tony 350 National Reorganization Process

Abdülhamid II 121 (1976–83) 259
accountability 41, 52, 235, 265, 333, public sector of 259–60
338, 451 Aristotle 110
collective 82 Asian Financial Crisis (1997–9) 342
democratic 106 Association of Education Committees
mechanisms 173 68
political 81, 93 Australia 4, 7, 17, 25, 96, 337, 341–2,
shared 333 351, 365
webs of 81, 88, 93, 452 Australian Capital Territory 361
administrative management principles Australian National Audit Office
planning, organizing, staffing, (ANAO) 333, 350
directing, coordinating, Australian Public Service
reporting and budgeting Commission (APSC) 328–9,
(POSDCORB) 211 336
Afghanistan 445–6 Changing Behaviour (2007)
Operation Enduring Freedom 346–7
(2001–14) 69, 200, 221, 443 Tackling Wicked Problems (2007)
presence of private military 347
contractors during 209 Australian Taxation Office (ATO)
African National Congress (ANC) 5, 334
138, 141 Centrelink 335, 338
Cadre Policy and Deployment closure of 330–31
Strategy (1997) 141 Council of Australian Governments
Albania 122 (COAG) 344–5, 352
Alfonsín, Raúl Closing the Gap program 355–8,
administration of 259–60 365
electoral victory of (1983) 259 National Indigenous Reform
Algeria 177–8 Agreement (NIRA) (2008)
Andrews, Matt 107 355–7
Appleby, Paul 272 Reform Council 357, 365
Report for Government of India trials (2002) 352–4
(1953) 276 Department of Education,
Argentina 6, 251, 262 Employment and Workplace
bureaucracy of 259–60, 262–3 Relations (DEEWR) 335
democratic reform in 259 Department of Families, Housing,
Anticorruption Office 262 Community Service and
managerial reform in Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA)
23,696 State Reform Act (1989) 334–5
260 Department of Finance 327–8, 333,
23,697 Economic Emergency Act 344
(1989) 260 Department of Human Services
Second Reform of the State 261–2 (DHS) 330, 335
463

Department of Prime Minister and Public Service (APS) 25, 64, 92, 324,
Cabinet 327–9, 338, 344, 346, 326, 328–9, 331, 335, 338–9,
351, 357, 363 342–3, 345, 348–9, 363
Cabinet Implementation Unit 332 Ahead of the Game: Blueprint
Department of Social Security 330 for the Reform of Australian
Department of Treasury 344, 363 Government Administration
environmental policies of (2010) 326–7, 329, 331–2,
Environment Protection and 336–7, 347–8
Biodiversity Conservation Commonwealth Financial
Act (1999) 360 Accountability Review 328
Garnaut Review 362–3 community engagement 336–7
greenhouse gas reduction 362 Project Wickenby 334
government of 323–5, 332, 334, Tackling Wicked Problems (2007)
341–3, 347, 349–50, 363 351
Engage (2009) 347 use of NPM in 325
NRM policies of 359, 361, 363 Public Service Commission 327
Great Barrier Reef 359 Secretaries Board 329
Indigenous population of 349–51, Queensland 360
354–7, 364 senior executive service (SES) 330
Aboriginal and Torres Strait State of the Environment report
Islander Commission (2011) 359, 363
(ATSIC) 353 Tasmania 360
disadvantages facing 351–2, 358 Victoria 360
expenditure 350 Austria 8, 371, 377, 387
Indigenous Affairs Arrangements public service reform in
(IAAs) 353–4 perceptions of 390, 392
Indigenous Communication Austrian School 25
Coordination Taskforce 354 autonomy 41, 135, 146, 377–80, 395
Indigenous Coordination Centres business 303
(ICCs) 352–5 expression of 48
Ministerial Taskforce on managerial 135, 379
Indigenous Affairs 353–4 professional 64
Secretaries’ Group on Indigenous Aylwin, Patricio 256
Affairs (SGIA) 354
Shared Responsibility Agreements Bachelet, Michelle 258–9
(SRA) 352 Barclays PLC 426
Kimberly region Barnett formula 430
Mulan Aboriginal Community Barroso, José Manuel
352 President of EC 429
Management Advisory Committee Basel System 66
(MAC) Al Beblawi, Hazem 161
Connecting Government (2004) Belgium
346–7, 349, 351 social service system of 65
Empowering Change (2010) 348 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 290
Murray-Darling Basin 360–62 Blackwater
Murray-Darling ministerial personnel of 217
Council 361 Blair, Tony 58, 422, 432, 436
New South Wales 360 administration of 71
Productivity Commission 364–5 ‘Modernising Government’
public administration reform in 343 programme of 22–3

Index 465
electoral victory of (1997) 376 Ministry of Administration and

‘Third Way’ 376–7 Reform of the State (MARE)
Boles, Nicholas 431 236
Book of Song, The 297 Ministry of Education 242
Bouckaert, Geert Ministry of Finance 242, 244
Public Management Reform 195 Ministry of Health 242
Bourgon, Jocelyne 185 Ministry of Planning 242, 244
Brazil 6, 444, 448, 450 Movimento Nacional pela Reforma
administrative reform in 234–8 Urbana (National Movement
civil society involvement 238–9 for Urban Reform) 241
Fiscal Responsibility Law (2000) Pernambuco 227, 238, 243
236, 243 Porto Alegre 240
Law 8.666 (1993) 236, 243 Rio Grande do Sul 227–8, 240
Master Plan for State Reform Santa Catarina 238
236 São Paulo 227–8, 238, 243
national conferences 241–2 Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos
participatory budget 240–41 role in creation of MARE 236–7
policy councils 239–40 Bretton Woods 2
Regime Júridicio Único dos British Petroleum (BP)
Servidores 236, 243 Deepwater Horizon Oil Crisis (2010)
urban master plan 241 425
administrative structure of 227–9, Buddhism 299
234 bureaucracy 90–91, 115–16, 159–60,
Chamber of Deputies 229, 231 162, 164, 170–71, 182, 195, 199,
executive power in 230–31 242, 248, 256, 273, 290–91, 304,
Federal Supreme Court (STF) 308, 374–5, 384, 390, 404, 412,
232–3 445, 449, 454–6, 458
judiciary power in 232–4 American 215
Legislative Assembly 229 Argentinian 259–60, 262–3
legislative power in 231–2 Canadian 182
National Congress 231, 238 Chilean 255, 263
Senate 229, 231–2 Chinese 309, 312
Brazilian Federal Public Chinese Imperial 114, 295, 297–8
Administration 234–5 Egyptian 160, 162, 164, 175–6, 180
Department of Public Prosecution federal 249, 251, 253–4
233–4 meritocratic 297–8, 301–2
Department of Public Service modern 113
Administration (DASP) 235 public 248, 251, 254–5, 363
Federal Constitution 226, 228–30, reduction of 376, 390
233–4, 239, 241 reform 248
Article 49 232 relationship with corruption 404,
Article 5 233 412
Federal Court of Accounts 232 Bush, George W.
FIFA World Cup (2014) 243 administration of 220
GDP per capita 226 use of program-level assessment
government of 227 213
Independence of (1822) 227
military government (1964–85) Calderón, Felipe 254
226 administration of 255
Minas Gerais 227–8, 238, 243 Cambodia 27

Canada 5, 25, 185, 450 criticisms of 94

bureaucracy of 182, 186–7 of policy making 88–9, 434
government of 188, 193 of power 221, 238
management culture of 192 Chavan, Ashok
Office of the Auditor General 193 Chief Minister of Maharashtra 287
Ottawa 187, 189, 193 Chicago School 25
Parliament 188, 195–6 Chile 6, 251, 263
Privy Council Office 189, 195–6 bureaucracy of 255, 263
Public Accounts Committee 193 Concertación alliance 255–6
public service reform in 25–6, 182, Congress 257–9
185, 189–91, 194–5 Constitution of 256
focus on NPM in 189–90, 452 democratic reform in 255–6
focus on private sector Consejo para la Transparencia
management practices 189–93 (Council on Transparency)
Prime Minister’s Advisory 259
Committee on the Public Transparency Law (2008) 259
Service 189 managerial reform in 249, 258
Treasury Board Program on State Modernization
‘Health of the Evaluation and Reform (2000) 257
Function’ 193 Strategic Plan for Public
Secretariat 39, 189, 192–3 Management Modernization
Canada-US Free Trade Agreement 186 256–7
capacity 330–32, 339, 444–5 Ministry of Finance
via collaboration 332–3 Budget Directorate 256
concept of 323–4 public administration 257–8
development of 323 public sector of 256
loss of 425–7 China 7, 66, 104, 113, 115, 122, 298–9,
in public sector reform 326 311, 318, 444
central 327 Anhui Province 313–14
externalizing 326 Lixin County 316
internal 327 Beijing 313–14
management 326 bureaucracy 302–3, 309
third-party 327–8 decentralization 309
capital Imperial 114, 295, 297–8, 298
accumulation 171 Civil Service Law 308
finance 63 Company Law (1994) 310
human 166, 328 Confucianism as state ideology in
capitalism 165–6, 184, 317, 443 297, 302
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 226, 242 corruption in 116
administration of 236 economy of 312
Carroll, Lewis GDP per capita 309, 312
Alice in Wonderland (1865) 110 government of 200
Central Agency for Public Guangdong Province
Mobilization and Statistics Shunde District 316
(CAPMAS) 172 Han Dynasty (206BC–220AD) 114,
central performance management 61 297, 299
Central Rural Policy Research Centre Hebei Province 315
313 Xian’an District 315
centralization 48, 59, 90–91, 93, 173, Hong Kong 112, 117
255, 264, 309, 372, 418, 449 Ministry of Civic Affairs 311–12

Index 467
Opium Wars (1839–42/1856–60) 296 Conservative Party (Australia) 362–3

public administration in 104, Conservative Party (UK) 25, 417, 428,
111–12, 114, 295, 304 431
reforms 311, 314–17 decline in Scotland 429–30
Qin Dynasty (221–206BC) 295 electoral manifesto (2015) 429
Song Dynasty (960–1279) 297 corporatization 326
State Assets Supervisory corruption 7, 15, 44, 46, 115–16, 145,
Commission 310 151, 162, 165, 167–9, 173, 250,
State Council 310, 313, 315 253, 262–3, 266, 271, 286–9,
Tang Dynasty (618–907) 297–8 291–2, 443, 446–7, 449, 453,
Tiananmen Square Incident (1989) 454–6, 458
313 anti-corruption organization 47,
Chinese Communist Party 290, 304, 445
Central Committee Plenum 312 measurement of 47, 173
members of 308 petty 173, 178
Thirteenth Party Congress (1987) relationship with bureaucracy 404,
308–9 412
Chrétien, Jean 183 Cyprus 428
Christian Democrats (Chile) 255
Christianity 5 De la Rúa, Fernando
climate change 358 administration of 262
carbon pricing 363 attempted managerial reforms of
greenhouse gas reduction 362 262
Clinton, Bill decentralization 18, 48–51, 248, 253,
administration of 18, 208–9, 261, 309–10, 326, 338, 449–50
448 administrative 135, 141–2, 152,
National Performance Review 375
(NPR) 208–9, 213–14 of human resources 143
State of the Union Address (1996) organizational 25
204 political 375
Cold War 209, 443 programmes 27–8
collaborative leadership 81, 87–8 Democratic Party 6, 15, 212, 222
Colombia 263 Deng Xiaoping 309
commercialization 326, 344 ‘Southern Tour’ (1992) 314
Common Assessment Framework Denmark 26
(CAF) 39, 42 public management reform in 27
Commonwealth 92, 329–30, 338, Ding Zuoming 316
445 Dong Zhongshu 295
Commonwealth Games 286 Dreze, Jean 274
Secretariat 139 Drummond, Don 185
communism 184, 373, 394 Du Gay, P.
Confucianism 106, 112–14, 116–19, In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber,
123, 299–300, 302–3, 316, 459 Organisation, Ethics (2000)
as state ideology of Imperial China 454–5
297 Du Runsheng 314
key tenants of 300–302 Duggett, Michael 24
neo-Confucianism 115–16, 118 Durkheim, Emile 75
New 117–18 concept of ‘elementary dimensions
rationale of 300–301 of variation in institutional
Confucius 295 forms’ 67, 71–3

e-Government Readiness Index (2004) Consultative Council 161

177 People’s Assembly 161
Egypt 5, 158, 178 public sector of 174–6
23 July Revolution (1952) 158, 163 Revolution (2011) 169
administrative governance system of Structural Adjustment Plan (1991)
158–9, 171, 173–4 167
civil service 164, 175 welfare state of 158–9
administrative reform in 162, 164, Eisenhower, Dwight D. 200–201
167–8, 179–80 Emerson, David 189
Citizens Relationship Endresen, Cecile 122
Management (CRM) 177 Erasmus University 86
Egyptian Government Services Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 121
Portal 177 Estonia 8, 371, 378, 384, 387, 393
Egyptian Regulatory Reform public service reform in 371–2
and Development Activity perceptions of 387–8, 391
(ERRADA) 176–7 use of NPM in 394–5, 447
National Telecommunications ethics 110, 392
Regulatory Authority European Central Bank (ECB) 428
(NTRA) 168 oversight capabilities of 429
Alexandria 174 European Commission (EC) 401–2,
British Occupation of (1882–1922) 428
162 personnel of 428
bureaucracy of 159–60, 162, 164, recommendations on Slovenian
170–72, 175–6, 180 government debt 399
Cairo 174 White Paper on Governance (2001)
Constitution (1971) 160 446
Constitution (2012) 161–2 European Council
corruption in 162, 165, 167–9, 173, members of 429
178 European Economic Community
economy of 166–8, 170 (EEC)
GDP per capita 170 members of 417
General Authority of Petroleum European Foundation of Quality
172 Management (EFQM) 39–40
government of 160–61, 174 European Monetary Union (EMU)
military of 166 400
Ministry of Administrative European Union (EU) 3, 28, 50, 66,
Development 172 122, 369, 374, 381, 394, 400, 402,
Ministry of Agriculture and Land 404–5, 416, 428–9, 437, 452, 455
Reclamation 171–2 accession criteria 371–2
Ministry of Irrigation and Water e-governance in 371
Resources 171 member states of 8, 87
Ministry of Labour Force 163–4 Stability and Growth Pact 402
Ministry of Manpower and Eurozone 402
Immigration 172 executive government 81–2, 87–8, 91,
Ministry of Petroleum 172 95, 98–9
Ministry of State for Administrative central capability/implementation
Development (MSAD) 177–8 89–90
Nile, River 162 core executive 83–4
parliament of 161–2 court politics 94, 96
Cabinet 160–61 formal/informal coordination 92

Index 469
interpretive turn 94–5 Garnaut, Ross

modernist empiricism 82–3 Garnaut Review 362–3
networks 92–4 Gaus, John M. 271
political accountability/webs of Geographic Information Systems
accountabilities 93–4 (GIS) 42
political biography 83 Germany 8, 26, 371, 373, 378, 387
presidential studies 94, 97 autonomy of public sector
institutional presidency 97–8 executives in 380
prime-ministerial predominance Fall of Berlin Wall (1989) 8, 49, 296
84–5, 88–9 goal ambiguity in 378
Ezz, Ahmed impact of Global Financial Crisis
personal finances of 168 (2007–9) on 394
public administration/sector reform
federalism 92, 207, 220, 272 in 386
dual 202 perceptions of 387–8, 390, 392
Finland use of NPM in 385
Government Programme (2004) 21 Ghosh, Dipak
Ford Motor Company 453 Chair of Indian Competition
personnel of 15 Commission 285
Fox, Vicente 253–4 Gillard, Julia 92
administration of 255 Gladstone, William Ewart
France 8, 26, 177, 371, 378, 384, 387 health policies of 62
autonomy of public sector Global Business and Economic
executives in 380 Roundtable on Addiction and
goal ambiguity in 378 Mental Health 194
impact of Global Financial Crisis Global Financial Crisis (2007–9) 8, 22,
(2007–9) on 394 108, 342, 401, 413–14, 420, 426,
Ministry of Finance 393 443–4
public administration reform in impact on governance 36
General Public Policy Review 372 impact on public administration
perceptions of 387–8, 392 reform 393–4
use of NPM in 372, 394, 447 impact on public regulation 65
Franco, Francisco 376 impact on public sector reform
Fraser-Moleketi, Geraldine 405–6
South African minister for Public Global Integrity 173
Service and Administration globalization 5, 22, 104, 182, 274
139, 141 impact on public sector 184
Fukuyama, Francis 2, 104–5, 107, 109, Google, Inc. 187
115 Gore, Al 213
view of governance 50, 443 Gove, Michael 431
governance 6–7, 13, 19–20, 22–3, 35,
Gaebler, Ted 18 39, 44, 48, 51–2, 59, 61–2, 90,
Gandhi, Indira 273 104–5, 115, 119, 137, 158, 199,
Gandhi, Mahatma 273, 291 221, 296–7, 342–3, 421, 425, 435,
Gandhi, Rahul 291 442–3, 450, 457, 460
Gandhi, Rajiv 274 Chinese 303
Gandhi, Sonia 284 collaborative 336, 361, 384, 396, 452
Ganguly, A.K. 288 coordination
Garfield, James A. hierarchy-type mechanism (HTM)
assassination of (1881) 211 42–3

network-type mechanism (NTM) inter-organizational arrangements

42–3 73
corporate 36–8, 46, 330 hierarchy 67–70
in public sector 38–40 market 69–70
reform program 40 use of contracts 69
definitions of 18, 51, 56–9 networks
for development 51–2 misconception of 70–71
development of 18–19 public administration 60, 66, 74–5
digital/e-governance 370–71, 373, shortcomings of 60–61, 66
384, 396, 405 Great Depression 202
European 36 Greece 428
executive 81 Green Party (Australia) 363
good 2–4, 8–9, 19, 72–3, 109, 120, Grindle, Merilee
173, 295, 318, 446, 454, 456, 459 concept of ‘good enough
holding 37 governance’ 120
measurement of 43 Guan Zi 297
in public sector 40–41
reform program 42–3 Han Fei 295
impact of Global Financial Crisis Hanumanthaiah, K.
(2007–9) on 36 Chairman of Administrative
metagovernance 57, 85–7 Reforms Commission II 276–7
multilevel 208, 428 Harper, Stephen 183
national 36 Hawke, Bob 344
network 42, 60, 70–71, 85–6, 91–3, Hazare, Anna 289–90, 292
456 He Kaiyin 313–14, 316
Ottoman 121 taxation reform policies of 315
public 36, 226, 243–4, 333, 336 healthcare 61–3
public service 37, 43–5 government autonomy in 64
measurement of 45 hospital management 67–8
reform program 44–5 social care 63
relationship with public sole practitioner 63–4
administration 199–201, 203–4, Heath, Edward
206–10, 222 administration of
role of networks in 18 Reorganisation of Central
shared 333 Government, The (1970) 16
state-centric 326 Heintzman, Ralph 188
suprastructure 37 Heritage Foundation 173
measurement of 47 Hindi (language) 271–2
in public sector 45–6 Hinduism 274, 283
reform program 46–7 caste system of 68
systemic 37, 50, 52 deities of 274
complexity of 49 Hood, Christopher 16–17, 24
measurement of 50 Hota, P.C. 279
in public sector 47–8 Howard, John 92
reform program 49–50 administration of 337
whole-of-government (WG) 49 environmental policies of 362
typology of 35–6 Hu Jingtao
governance theory 56–9, 66–7, 74–5 economic policies of 312
good governance 72–3 Human Sciences Research Council 141
institutional dynamics 7 Hungary 8, 120, 371, 387

Index 471
autonomy of public sector corruption in 286, 288

executives in 380 government of 272, 285, 287, 290–91
impact of Global Financial Crisis Hyderabad 276
(2007–9) on 394 India Independent Act (1947) 275
public administration reform in 373 Karnataka 284
perceptions of 387–8, 392, 396 Kerala 273, 290
use of NPM in 394–5 Maharashtra 287
Hussein, Saddam Mandal Commission 281, 283
removed from power (2003) 69 Ministry of Home Affairs 287
Ministry of Law and Justice 288
India 6–7, 177, 271–2, 274–5, 444–5, Ministry of Personnel, Training and
454 Public Grievances 287–8
administrative structure of 283–4 Mumbai (Bombay) 283, 287
Administrative Reforms New Economic Policy (NEP) (1990)
Commission (ARC) 277 274, 277, 285
Central Bureau of Investigation Parliament 275–6, 286–7, 290
(CBI) 284–5, 287–9 Election Commission (EC) 289
Central Vigilance Commission Estimates Committee of 278
(CVC) 287, 289–90 Lok Sabha 289
Competition Commission 285 Public Accounts Committee
Indian Administrative Service (PAC) 284
(IAS) 275, 277–9, 284, 291 Rajya Sabha (Council of States)
Indian Civil Service (ICS) 275, 279 277, 286–7, 289
Indian Foreign Service (IFS) 277 population of 271–2
Indian Forest Service 278 Public Interest Litigation (PIL) 286,
Indian Police Service (IPS) 275, 288, 292
277–8, 280 Representation of People Act (1951)
State Public Services Commission 290
279 Section 8(4) 290
States Reorganization Right to Information (RTI) Act
Commission (SRC) 277 (2005) 292
Supreme Court 279, 281–3, 285–6, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) 287
288, 290 Uttar Pradesh (UP) 284, 287
Union Public Service Commission West Bengal 287
(UPSC) 278–9, 288 Indian National Congress 272–3, 284
All-India Services (AIS) 272, 277–9 members of 286–7, 289, 291
selection process for 279–80 Indonesia 27
Andhra Pradesh 284–5 information and communication
Bihar 291 technologies (ICT) 38, 180, 235,
Coal Ministry 284 272, 332, 338
Constitution of 272, 281 contracts 424
Articles 14–16 281 government utilisation of 177–8
Article 3 272 Institute for Management
Article 309 279 Development (IMD) 403–4
Article 311 289–90 Competitiveness Yearbook 402
Article 312 277 Institutional Revolutionary Party
Article 315 278 (PRI)
Article 316 279 electoral defeat of (2000) 251
Article 335 281 International Court of Arbitration 1
Article 356 272 International Court of Justice 1

International Criminal Court 66 Khare, V.N.

International Foundation for Electoral Chief Justice of Indian Supreme
Systems 443 Court 285
International Institute of Kuhn, Thomas 98–9
Administrative Sciences 23 Kumar, Nitish
International Monetary Fund (IMF) former Director of CBI 285
159, 170, 428 Kuwait 170
Structural Adjustment Plan (Egypt)
(1991) 167 Labor Party (Australia) 92, 362
international relations 59–60 labour
Internet Corporation for Assigned division of 67
Names and Numbers (ICANN) Labour Party (UK) 417, 429
66 New Labour 25, 426–7, 430–32
Iraq 445–6 Lagos, Ricardo 259
Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–11) public administration reforms of 257
69, 200, 221, 443 Latin America 6, 247–51, 262–3
presence of private military civil service reform 249, 254–5
contractors during 209, 217 transparency 263
Islam 5, 104, 119, 122, 276 democratization in 248–51, 253,
Five Pillars of 457 255–6, 258, 263–4
Islamism 169 managerial reform 249, 256–7,
radical 120 261–2
ISO 39–40 Latvia 151
Israel 166 public management reform in 147
Italy 8, 371, 384 Le Grand, Julian 193
autonomy of public sector executives Lee Kuan Yew 112
in 380, 395 Lehman Brothers 426
public administration reform in Levin, Richard
374 Director General of DPSA 139
perceptions of 387–8, 392 Li Changping 315
trends in 385 Li Peijie 314–15
use of NPM in 447 Li Peng 314
Liberal Democrat Party (UK) 25, 429,
Jackson, Andrew 431
administration of 211 Liberal-National government
Japan 112, 166 (Australia)
Jenkins, Simon 21–2 electoral victory of (1996) 352–3
Jiang Zemin electoral victory of (2013) 357
General Secretary of Chinese Light, Paul 216
Communist Party 312 Lithuania
Justice and Development Party (AKP) public management reform in 147
121 Liu Xingjie 314–15
Lloyd George, David 275
Kargil War (1999) 287 health policies of 62, 64
Kashmir 276 Lu Buwei 295
Kejriwal, Arvind 290 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 226, 237,
Kemal, Mustafa Ataturk 121 242
Kennedy, John F.
administration of 15 MacKenzie, General Lewis 187
Keynesianism 416, 418, 421, 435 macroeconomic 401–2, 428

Index 473
al-Maghraby, Ahmed Mubarak, Hosni

Egyptian Minister of Housing 168–9 regime of 168–9
personal finances of 169 removed from power (2011) 169
Mahbubani, Kishore 50, 105–6, 118 al-Mulk, Nizām
Major, John 421, 436 Siyāsatnāma (Book of Government,
Malaysia 177 The) (1960) 119
Management Accountability Mulroney, Brian
Framework (MAF) 39–40 administration of 195
Manning, Chelsea (Bradley) electoral victory of (1984) 183
trial of 200 Muslim Brotherhood 169–70
Mao Zedong 296, 304, 308
Great Leap Forward 314 Nagpal, Durga Shakti 284
Martin, Paul 183, 188 Nasser, Gamal Abdul
Max Planck Institute 86 public sector policies of 158
Mayntz, Renate 86 Tawzeef policies 163
McNamara, Robert S. National Action Party (PAN)
US Defense Secretary 15–16 electoral victory of (2000) 251
Menem, Carlos National Democratic Party (NDP) 168
administration of 262 members of 168
economic policies of 260 nationalism
electoral victory of (1988) 260 Arab 163
Menes, King 162 nationalization 21–2, 158, 426
Mexico 6 large-scale 163
Congress 251, 253–4 natural resource management (NRM)
Constitution 251 358–9, 361, 363–4
corruption in 253 planning 362
democratic reform in 251, 255 policy issues 360
Civil Service Law (2003) 254 regional planning 361–2
Federal Audit Office 251 stress 359
Freedom of Information Law Nehru, Jawaharlal 291
(2002) 254 neoliberalism 326, 338, 449, 451, 459
Instituto Federal de Acceso a la neo-Weberian state (NWS) 36
Información (IFAI) 254 Netherlands 8, 26, 86, 146, 371, 378–9,
National Council of Evaluation of 384, 387
Social Policy (Coneval) autonomy of public sector executives
254–5 in 379, 395
Strategic Model for Government goal ambiguity in 378
Innovation (2001) 253 impact of Global Financial Crisis
Ministry of Finance 254 (2007–9) on 393
Ministry of Public Administration public administration reforms in
254 374–5
microeconomic perceptions of 387–8, 390–92
reform principles 344 use of NPM in 384–5, 394, 447
Mintzberg, Henry 184 public service 64
Montesquieu new public governance (NPG) 29, 36
definition of power 228 new public management (NPM) 5–7,
Moran, Terry 329, 336 13–14, 18, 22–4, 29, 31, 36, 137–8,
Morocco 177–8 146, 184, 212, 215–16, 226, 243–4,
Morsi, Dr Mohammed 264, 295, 317, 363, 369–70, 372–3,
electoral victory of (2012) 169 419–22, 436, 448, 452–3, 456–7

adoption of 25–6 Organisation for Economic

civic engagement Co-operation and Development
digital/e-governance 370 (OECD) 23, 136–7, 176, 375
corporatization 135, 150–52 ‘Government at a Glance’ initiative
criticisms of 20, 23–4 45
decentralization in 27–8, 141–2, 152 member states of 325, 341
decline of 108 partnership guidelines 44
development of 136 Organization of Petroleum Exporting
economic rationalism principles of Countries (OPEC)
341 oil embargo (1973) 209
efficiency principles 360 Osborne, David 18
global 27 Osborne, Stephen 29
modification of 25 Ostrom, Vincent 48
post- 24, 31, 108, 317, 369, 373, Ottoman Empire 112, 119–21
376–7, 384 Constantinople 122
use in public administration/service Tanzimat era (1839–76) 120–21
reform 135–9, 142, 152, 189–91,
256–7, 325–6, 374–9, 382–6, Pakistan 276
394–6, 405, 416, 419, 421–4, Parakh, P.C.
447, 450 secretary of Indian Coal Ministry
New Zealand 17, 25, 220 284
public service 64 Partnership for Public Service
Nixon, Richard personnel of 218
Watergate Scandal (1972) 212 Pasha, Mohammed Ali 162
non-governmental organizations Patel, Sardar Vallavhai
(NGOs) 17, 49, 290, 292 Indian Home Minister 275
international 47 People’s Daily 313
Northern Ireland performance management 5, 26, 64–5,
devolution in 430 69, 71, 135–6, 143, 145–7, 149, 378
Northern Rock central 61
nationalization of (2008) 21 systems 150
Norway 8, 369, 371, 378, 380, 387 Peronism 260
autonomy of public sector executives Philippines 27
in 379, 395 Pickles, Eric 431
civil service of 375 Pinochet, Augusto
goal ambiguity in 378 regime of 255–6
impact of Global Financial Crisis politicization 90, 290, 395, 435, 437
(2007–9) on 393 of criminals 289
public administration reforms in of elite bureaucracy 258
385–6 of public sector 380–82
perceptions of 387–8, 390–92, Pollitt, Chris
396 Public Management Reform 195
use of NPM in 375, 394, 447 Portugal 227, 428
private finance initiative (PFI) 420
Obama, Barack privatization 26, 49, 261, 326, 344, 385,
administration of 216 396
healthcare policies of 217–18 large-scale 418
Occidentalism 105 of public enterprises 236–7
O’Neill, Tip 184 Program Evaluation and Review
Orbán, Viktor 373 Technique (PERT) 39

Index 475
Prussia 116 Balkanization of 142

public administration (PA) 2–4, development-based 107
6–7, 19, 21–2, 29–30, 56, 107–8, goal ambiguity in 378
110–11, 115, 137, 176, 179, 199, impact of globalization on 184
206–7, 210, 226, 229, 244, 247, modernization 27
264–5, 343, 435, 447–8, 452, neoliberal 455–9
456–8, 460 private sector management practices
Chinese 104, 111–12, 114, 295, 304, in 183, 191–3
311 use of NPM 135–9, 142, 189–90,
Confucian 106, 108, 112, 114, 118 256–7
neo-Confucian 116–17
concept of 13–15 Qianlong Emperor (1711–99) 113
development of model of 15–18 Qin Shi Huangdi 298
role of networks in 17–18 grand unification (221BC) 302
global/Western 104–9, 114, 123–5
improvement of bureaucracy 20 Rao, P.V. Narasimha
Islamic 104, 106, 111, 118–22 economic policies of 274
Ottoman 112, 118–22 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
multicultural 109 290
non-Western (NWPA) 104, 109, 122 Reagan, Ronald 297
progressive (PPA) 235–6, 244 administration of 17, 212, 221
relationship with governance public sector reform policies 216
199–201, 203–4, 206–10, 222 electoral victory of (1989) 183
reform 210–11, 257, 311, 314–17, Rehn, Olli
371–6, 386–8, 393–5, 405, 416 EC Director General for Economic
theory of governance 60, 66, 74–5, and Financial Affairs 428
81 Reid, Scott 188
Waldovian tradition of 271 Republic of Ireland 428
Weberian model of 22, 28, 308 Republican Party 6, 15, 222
public management 13–14, 30–31 Rhodes, R.A.W. 4, 18, 60–61, 68–9
reform 27, 147 view of governance 58
public-private partnerships (PPP) views on development of
38–9, 63, 208, 420 bureaucracy 20–21
difficulty in managing 217 Riggs, Fred W. 271
public procurement agencies 69 Robertson, George
public sector management 37–9, 195, Secretary of State for Scotland 432
337 Romania 120
influence of private sector practices Rompuy, Van
in 193–4 President of European Council 429
models of 136 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 221
perceptions of reform 385–7 New Deal 211
Public Service Alliance of Canada Rudd, Paul 92
(PSAC) 194 environmental policies of 362
public service reform 25–6, 44, 135–6, Russian Federation
139, 165–6, 180, 185, 195, 247, public management reform in 147
251, 261, 325, 336, 341, 343,
369–71, 377, 338, 385–6, 389, 396, Sadat, Anwar
405–6, 411, 445, 447–9, 451–2 assassination of (1981) 167
autonomy of public sector executives creation of Consultative Council
in 379–81 (1981) 161

public sector policies of 158–9, 165 Pension and Disability Insurance

Law No. 43 (1974) 166 Act (2012) 409
Sang Hongyang 297 public administration reform in
Sarkozy, Nicolas 405
administration of 372 public sector reform in 405–6,
Saudi Arabia 170 413–14
Schapf, Fritz 86 Balancing of Public Finances Act
Schäuble, Wolfgang (2012) 407–8, 410, 413
German Finance Minister 428 National Reform Programme
Scholte, Jan Aart 183–4 2013–14 411
Scottish National Party (SNP) 435, use of austerity measures 406–7,
437 411
Second World War (1939–45) 15, 20, use of NPM in 405
203, 215, 218, 221, 447 taxation reform in 410–11
Sen, Amartya 274 welfare reforms 408–9
Shang Yang 295 Snowden, Eric
Sharma, S.K. NSA surveillance disclosure (2013–)
Indian Secretary of Defense 285 200, 209
Sheikh, Munir 186 socialism 273
Chief Statistician for Canada 186, democratic 276
453 Indian 273
Shen Buhai 295 Socialists (Chile) 255, 257
Shergold, Peter 336 Somalia 443
Shi Huangdi 295 South Africa 445
Shipman, Harold 64 apartheid era 138, 141, 143
Sikhism 283 Constitution (1996) 139–41
Simon, Herbert 136, 207 Department of Labor (DoL) 148,
Singapore 112, 117 151–2
Singh, General V.K. 285 Inspection Enforcement Services
Singh, Manmohan 274, 284 (IES) 151
Singh, V.P. Public Employment Services
implementation of Mandal (PES) 151
Commission Report (1990) 283 Department of Public Service and
Slovenia 9, 177, 399, 406–7, 412, 444, Administration (DPSA) 139,
454 142, 144, 148, 151, 153
consumption in 400–401 Performance Management
economy of 400–401, 403, 413–14 Development System (PMDS)
GDP per capita 400, 406 148
government of Senior Management Service
debt of 401 (SMS) Handbook 148–9
deficit of 399, 401–2 government of 135
efficiency in 402–4 Improving Government Performance
Slovenian Exit Strategy 2010–13 (2009) 147
406 National Planning Commission
impact of Global Financial Crisis National Development Plan
(2007–9) on 401, 405–6, (NDP) 153–4
413–14 National Treasury 148, 151, 153
institutional competitiveness of 412 Framework for Managing
labour market reform in 409–11 Programme Performance
pension reform in 409 Information (2007) 147

Index 477
parliament Sweden 26
National Assembly 139 government of 16
National Council of Provinces Syria
(NCOP) 139 Civil War (2011–) 443
Pretoria 151
Public Management Finance Act Taiwan 112, 117
(PFMA) 144–5 Taizong 298
Public Service Commission (PSC) Taliban
140–41, 143, 153 removed from power (2001) 69
public service reform 135–6, 150, Taoism 299
153 Telecom Egypt 168
Medium-Term Strategic Tellier, Paul 189
Framework (MTSF) Canadian Cabinet Secretary 195
147 Thatcher, Margaret 58, 297, 447
Presidential Review Commission administration of 17
of Inquiry on Transformation electoral victory of (1979) 183, 376
and Reform in the Public Thomas, P.J. 290
Service (PRC) 139 trade unions 62
Public Service Act (PSA) 142–4, transparency 385
147, 154 Transparency International 173
Public Service Regulations (PSR) Corruption Perceptions Index 173,
143–4, 147 286
use of NPM 135–9, 142, 152, Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 59–60
452–3 Troika
White Paper on the Transformation components of 428
of the Public Service 139 Tunisia 177–8
South African National Planning Turkey
Commission 446 government of 122
South Korea 112, 177 Istanbul 121
sovereignty 59 Taksim Square/Gezi Park
parliamentary 82 demonstrations (2013) 121–2
Soviet Union (USSR) 209
collapse of (1991) 443 UK Competition Commission
Spain 8, 200, 371, 384 (UKCC) 426
autonomy of public sector Ukraine
executives in 380 Crimean Crisis (2014–) 443
impact of Global Financial Crisis unemployment 203, 260, 330, 350, 357,
(2007–9) on 393 393, 408
public administration reform in disguised 165
375–6 insurance 218
perceptions of 388 Unión Civica Radical
use of NPM in 385, 394, 447 members of 259, 262
Standish Group 218 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 170
Statistics Canada 186, 194, 453 United Kingdom (UK) 8, 20–21,
Stier, Max 59–60, 83, 85, 95–6, 139, 325,
President of Partnership for Public 337, 345, 371, 376, 378, 381, 384,
Service 218 418–21, 452
Sturgeon, Nicola Audit Commission 422
SNP Deputy First Minister 435 Audit of Political Engagement 425
Sun Yat-sen 297 Border Agency 420

Cabinet Office 83 Parliament 431, 434

Citizen’s Charter 421–2 Scotland Act (2012) 431
Coalition Government 25, 377, social service system of 65
422–3, 428, 431 Stern Report 362–3
Civil Service Reform Plan 435 Treasury 21, 83, 419, 425, 430
Open Public Services 23 Wales 430–31
opposition to ECB oversight 429 Westminster 81–2, 88, 90, 97, 196,
Commission for Social Care 431–4, 437
Inspection 422 United Nations (UN) 19, 28, 455
Department for Work and Pensions Economic and Social Commission
430 for Asia and the Pacific
Department of Education 68 (UNESCAP) 446
Department of the Environment Educational, Scientific and Cultural
16 Organizations (UNESCO)
devolution of government 428–33 World Heritage Sites 360
economy of 417–18, 435 United Progressive Alliance (UPA 1)
education system of 68 291
Fulton Report (1968) 16, 277 United States of America (USA) 6, 18,
GDP per capita 417 26–7, 30, 66, 97, 139, 146, 166,
government of 146, 436–7 199–200, 202–3, 208–11, 219–20,
loss of capacity 425–7, 437 337, 421, 443–4, 450, 458
Healthcare Commission 422 9/11 Attacks 200
impact of Global Financial Crisis Air Force (USAF) 15
(2007–9) on 393 Boston, MA 218
London 200, 430 Congress 203, 207, 210, 213
Ministry of Munitions 62 House of Representatives 200
National Audit Office (NAO) 422, Constitution of 202
427 Defense Department 15–16
National Health Service (NHS) 61, Department of Homeland Security
63, 67–8, 434 212
Next Steps agencies 151–2, 154 economy of 204
North Sea oil fields 419 Food and Drug Administration
Office for Standards in Education (FDA) 213
(Ofsted) 422 governance/public administration
Office of National Statistics relationship in 199–201, 208–10,
Atlas of Deprivation (2011) 3 222
Parliament 59, 430, 434 development of 203–4, 206–7
Plowden Report 16 interdependence 209
public administration reform in 393, Government Accountability Office
423 217
use of PFI/PPP 420 government of 202, 204, 210
use of NPM in 8–9, 416, 419, shut down (2013) 200
421–2, 424, 435–6, 447 Great Society 212
public sector market of 424 Hoover Commission 277
public service reform 64, 376 Hurricane Katrina (2005) 215, 220,
perceptions of 388, 390–91 452
‘Third Way’ 377 Hurricane Sandy (2012) 215, 220
Scotland 431–4 Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
devolution/independence issue 213–14
428, 430, 432 Medicaid 220

Index 479
Medicare 220 Vietnam War (1955–75) 204, 453

military of 112 Virginian School 25
National Health Service (NHS) 417
National Security Agency (NSA) Wang Anshi 118, 297–8
221 Wan Yan Shu (Memorandum of a
surveillance disclosure (2013–) Myriad Words) (1935) 116–17
200, 209 Wang Baoming 315
Oakland, CA 218–19 Wang Binyu 315
Office of Federal Procurement Wang Yuzhao 313
Policy 216 Wang Zhaoyao 314
Office of Management and Budget Warsaw Pact 65
211–12 Washington Consensus 260, 264
Postal Service 213 Weber, Max 15, 22, 69, 117, 249, 372
public administration reform in model of bureaucracy 20, 50, 136,
210–11 297–8, 458
Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) model of public administration 22,
217, 445 28, 136
Federal Activities Inventory Wen Jiabao
Reform (FAIR) (1998) economic policies of 312
216 Wilkerson, Bill 194
Government Performance and Wilson, Harold 83
Results Act (1993) 213 Wilson, Woodrow 15
Pendleton Act (1883) 211 Workers’ Party (Brazil) 240
Reorganization Act (1939) 211 World Bank (WB) 2–3, 18, 28, 107,
role of NPM in 215–16, 453 159, 455
role of NPR in 208–9, 213–14 Governance Indicators 404–5
public sector market of 424 Structural Adjustment Plan (Egypt)
Quantico, VA 200 (1991) 167
San Francisco, CA 218–19 World Economic Forum (WEF) 412
Social Security Administration Global Competitiveness Report 404
213 World Trade Organization (WTO) 66
State Department 200, 217 Wudi 297
US Minerals Management Service
425 Xinhua News Agency
use of institutional presidency Anhui Bureau 313
concept in 97
War on Poverty 199 Yadav, Lalu Prasad 291
Washington DC 2, 217, 317 Yang Wenliang 315
University of Gothenburg 45 Yom Kippur War (1973) 166
urbanization 359, 444 Young Turks 116
Uruguay Yugoslavia 9, 443
civil service reform in 249
Zhao Ziyang
Vadra, Robert Party Secretary General of Chinese
alleged land scam of 284 Communist Party 308
value for money (VFM) 16, 64, 436 Zhu Rongji
Vargas, Getúlio 234 public administration reform
administrative reforms of 234–6 policies of 312
Venetian Republic 116 Zhu Xi 295


Week 4

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Week 4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK

OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

A catalogue record for this book

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957084

This book is available electronically in the

ISBN 978 1 78195 448 5 (cased)

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

PART I PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, NEW PUBLIC

1 Public administration, public management and governance 13

PART II INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES OF PUBLIC

6 Public service reform in South Africa: from apartheid to new

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

9 Public administration and governance in the USA 199

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Perri 6 is Professor in Public Management at Queen Mary University of

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Organization – Decisive Governance and president of the International

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

States Congress, and has been a consultant to several international organi-

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

tion and ­prevention, collaboration and consultation, service delivery,

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Janine O’Flynn is Professor of Public Management at the University of

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Management Institute at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a senior

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

We all live continually in a time of change, whether in an age of innova-

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

­ racticalities of both public administration and governance. But these

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

that in ‘some developing countries, we continue to see a wide gap – or in

1. What is good governance?

In terms of question 6, it is worth recalling the statistic that Europe, with

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Crossing the border, Andranovich and Anagnoson (Chapter 9) deliver

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

a separation of policy and m ­ anagement of delivery through agencies and

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

This chapter introduces and contextualizes public administration, public

KEY CONCEPTS, HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND

In one simple and straightforward form of analysis, it is possible to view

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

● management and leadership in public sector organizations

Traditionally, much of the focus of public administration was on the

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

the Treasury or Defense (Dallek, 2003: 312). Under McNamara, the

Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston - 9781781954485

there would be increased emphasis on the disciplined use of resources,

driven partly by the forces of globalization and by international organiza-

PART I PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, NEW PUBLIC

1 Public administration, public management and governance 13

PART II INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES OF PUBLIC

6 Public service reform in South Africa: from apartheid to new

9 Public administration and governance in the USA 199

tion and prevention, collaboration and consultation, service delivery,

racticalities of both public administration and governance. But these

a separation of policy and m anagement of delivery through agencies and

In the UK (and in other states facing the consequences of the post-2008

represented an attempt (albeit flawed) to produce a sector-wide blueprint

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON SUB-CONCEPTS

From the above it is possible to derive a clear reform program consisting